A Book Review of
Elizabeth S. Scott and Laurence Steinberg
2008, Harvard University Press
Reviewed by Steve Van Bockern
A 12-year-old charged with two counts of homicide will stand trial as an adult. The boy is charged in the February 2009 shooting deaths of his father’s pregnant fiancée and her unborn son, Christopher. The boy was 11 at the time of the killings. If convicted of murder as an adult, he faces life in prison without parole.
Our courts are faced with the dilemma of trying to determine when children and if children should be tried as adults. Questions abound:
- When is a child a child and adult an adult?Even when there is an horrendous act of violence by a child, is she less culpable by virtue of her immaturity?
- At what age does a person become fully responsible for crimes committed?
- Is trying children as adults successful? How do you define success?
- Do juvenile courts rehabilitate better than adult prisons?
Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg are very much aware of the range of questions and the complexity of trying young persons as adults. In a book that is well researched and written, they wade into the controversies and offer a unique perspective. They recognize that lawmakers think of childhood and adulthood as two distinct categories. That binary thinking, in effect, limits the justice dispensed. They argue that a third category, adolescents, needs to be considered and incorporated into juvenile justice.
Adolescence is a distinctive developmental state. People are not fully children or adults. Justice needs to take this in account before it can be called justice. They maintain that adolescents are responsible for their criminal conduct and should be punished for their misdeeds; however, adolescents deserve less punishment than do adult offenders. The authors conclude that ordinary teenagers differ from adults in their decision-making capacities, that their “deficiencies” are developmental in nature, and that the psychological deficits contribute to immature judgment. All of this is grounded in what they call neurobiological immaturity. An accompanying argument is that youthful immaturity could undermine the capacities of some youths to assist their attorneys and limit their ability to function as criminal defendants. The authors argue that the transitional state of adolescence cannot be ignored.
What are some of those transitional states that make the adolescent different than the adult criminal? The authors suggest three broad categories and explanations:
1. Psychological maturity
a. While cognitively as bright as adults by age 16; wisdom is lacking. While not all adolescence make bad decisions it is typical for this age group.
b. Teenagers are considerably more susceptible to peer influence than are adults. They focus on immediate rather than long-term consequences.
c. Personal identity is fluid and unformed in adolescence. This is a period of time when youth begin to separate from their parents, experiment often in risky endeavors and struggle to figure out who they are.
d. Studies of brain development show that during adolescence, significant maturation occurs in brain systems and regions involved in long-term planning, impulse control, regulation of emotion and evaluation of risk and reward. Although the connection between moodiness and impulsivity is not clear, it is likely that extreme levels of emotional arousal (either anger or elation) are associated with difficulties in self-control.
e. Brain studies show that the limbic system at puberty may promote reckless, sensation-seeking conduct especially in peer groups in early and mid-adolescence while the regions of the prefrontal cortex that control the executive functions of planning, emotion regulation, impulse control, and evaluation of risk and reward continue to mature over the course of adolescence and into young adulthood.
2. Patterns of involvement in crime
a. There is a tendency of many teenagers to get involved in criminal activity. This tendency is so pervasive that psychologist Terrie Moffitt, one of the world’s leading experts on the development of antisocial behavior, has described delinquent behavior as “a normal part of teenager life.”
b. Criminal behavior follows a predictable course during adolescence and early adulthood. Criminal behavior is rare in childhood, increases dramatically at age 16 and begins to decline at age 17.
3. Transition to adulthood
a. Most evidence indicates that adult imprisonment increases juvenile re-offending and research indicates that interventions that invest in the social development of young offenders diminish the risk of re-offending
b. Research tells us what kids need to transition into healthy adulthood
i. A healthy adult who is involved in the life of the young person
ii. Membership in a peer group that models and values pro-social behavior and academic success. Pro-social peer pressure is a good thing.
iii. Participation in activities that permit the adolescent to develop. Giving kids power develops self-reliance, self-efficiency, moral thinking, and more sophisticated reasoning abilities.
While the authors spend a good bit of time making a valued argument that adolescents require different considerations to ensure justice, the problem of determining who is an adolescent remains. The authors prefer a categorical presumption of immaturity based on age because it offers substantial efficiencies over an approach in which adolescents are assessed on a case-by-case basis. Since mitigation claims would be a part of virtually every criminal adjudication involving a serious crime by a youth, individual assessment on a case- by-case base would be too expensive. The authors claim that we just don’t have the diagnostic tools to evaluate psychosocial immaturity reliably on an individual basis or to distinguish young career criminals from ordinary adolescents.
While this book is mostly for those involved in questions of juvenile justice, it is an interesting read for those who come in contact with the legal world, often through the work with troubled and troubling youth. Concepts of culpability, proportionality, mitigation, blameworthiness and others are explained and explored. There is an academic bent to this book as choice and character theories are examined. The tensions between the interest of individual children and those of society are argued. Research that lays out the pros and cons of juvenile rehabilitation or punishment in adult settings are ample.
Landmark cases are presented to help provide additional context for understanding. For example, in 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Gault to extend the due process protection to youths in delinquency proceedings. Gerald Gault was arrested in making offensive phone calls to his neighbor. Gerald, 15, was brought before a juvenile court but wasn’t given notice of the charges and didn’t have an attorney to represent him. The neighbor never testified, only the police officer. Gerald was committed to the Arizona State Industrial School for up to six years. The procedural changes ordered by the Court transformed delinquency proceedings into more formal adversarial hearings.
I liked too, that the authors suggested rehabilitation programs that seem to work for youth. Aggression Replacement Training, Functional Family Therapy, Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care (MTFC) and Multi-systemic therapy (MST) were discussed. They did make the statement that not all juvenile programs are effective at reducing crime. Two popular programs, military boot camps and scared straight don’t work.
The debate about how to handle our young offenders will continue. This book sheds light on the debate, suggests a possible solution and contributes to understanding the issues and questions that confront juvenile justice.
Click here to purchase this book.
