I will begin with an example from the USA. The phrase above comes from a key ruling by the United States Supreme Court that I would like to use to demonstrate the importance of conflicting discourses surrounding the interpretation of youth crime. In 2005, the narrowest possible majority of five to four judges ruled that the death penalty for persons over the age of 15 but under the age of 18 at the time of an offence constituted âcruel and unusual punishmentâ, i.e. breached the Eighth Amendment and thus the United States Constitution (Roper v. Simmons 543 U.S. 551 (2005)). Since then, it has not been possible to sentence persons in that age group to death. According to Drinan (2018, 84), the ruling is connected to other decisions by the Supreme Court that open up certain possibilities for revising the US trend towards increasing punitiveness. That âpunitive turnâ in the approach to crime began in the USA back in the 1960s (Beckett/Sasson 2000, 47â74; Clear/Frost 2015, 71â112) and gradually became a project of imposing harsher sentencing that is unique in history. Prison sentences experienced a lasting renaissance. Although they are hardly an effective means of preventing reoffending (Cullen et al. 2011; Nagin et al. 2009; Travis et al. 2014), they were widely used as a way of responding to crime and in particular to recidivism. Political decisions (Beckett 1997; Tonry 2016) were primarily responsible for the trend described as âmass imprisonmentâ (Garland 2001b). Rising or falling rates of imprisonment are not a systematic function of rising or falling crime rates (Lappi-SeppĂ€lĂ€ 2010, 978; Muncie 2008, 117; Tonry 2007, 2â3). Changes are instead largely a result of political decisions to imprison more or fewer people for specific offences. It is not rising rates of crime or violence but political decisions that are at the heart of why approaches to crime and offenders have changed. In countries such as England/Wales and the USA, for example, there has been a remarkable trend towards more punitive penal policies (e.g. Garland 2001b; Pratt et al. 2005; Wacquant 2010; for European trends in imprisonment: Lappi-SeppĂ€lĂ€ 2014; for Germany: Sack 2013). Statistically speaking, the primary subject or victims of such policies were the socially disadvantaged and dark-skinned people (e.g. Alexander 2010; Western 2006; Wacquant 2009).
I do not want to go into any further detail here. Criminal policy will be the focus of the second chapter. What is more important at this point is that young people were also affected by the trend towards more punitive measures.1 While future trends in the USA towards less or even greater punitiveness will be foreseeable, the above ruling decision illustrates a central aspect for this book: youth is a highly contentious area. When young people commit an offence, it can be interpreted in very different ways. In principle, the same applies to adults. Here too, there are different principles for dealing with crime, which vary between a sympathetic focus on help and support on the one hand and a rather hostile focus on mere punishment and retribution on the other (Melossi 2000). However, youthfulness often is a blank canvas onto which both hopes and fears are projected. It is a particularly contentious area. The mere age of a person is not particularly important; the decisive factor is how age is interpreted and what significance is attached to the perception that relatively young people commit offences.
One illustration of this is the passage below, which is taken from the opinion announcement in which Justice Anthony M. Kennedy set out the majority ruling of the court in Roper v. Simmons as to why the death penalty for juveniles is unconstitutional. The passage relates to the case of the defendant Christopher Simmons. He had admitted to being involved in a burglary and a planned murder at the age of 17. He was charged with the offences in Missouri, found guilty and sentenced to death. Following a number of unsuccessful appeals by the defendant, the United States Supreme Court finally issued the above ruling that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional. During the trial in Missouri that had led to the death sentence subsequently revoked, the following interaction occurred:
During closing arguments, both the prosecutor and defense counsel addressed Simmonsâ age, which the trial judge had instructed the jurors they could consider as a mitigating factor. Defense counsel reminded the jurors that juveniles of Simmonsâ age cannot drink, serve on juries, or even see certain movies, because âthe legislatures have wisely decided that individuals of a certain age arenât responsible enoughâ. Defense counsel argued that Simmonsâ age should make âa huge difference to [the jurors] in deciding just exactly what sort of punishment to makeâ. In rebuttal, the prosecutor gave the following response: âAge, he says. Think about age. Seventeen years old. Isnât that scary? Doesnât that scare you? Mitigating? Quite the contrary I submit. Quite the contraryâ.
(Roper v. Simmons 543 U.S. 551 (2005))
The defendant was 17 years old at the time of the crime, but age is in itself irrelevant, as it is open to different interpretations. In particular, age can be associated with particular moral characteristics and with a smaller or larger ability to know what one is doing. âThus, through the official administration of âageâ categories are such characterizations as âguiltâ and âinnocenceâ rendered available or unavailable for deciding particular outcomesâ (Atkinson 1980, 44). The public prosecutor and the defence counsel demonstrate two different possible assessments. According to the defence counsel, youth is a âmitigating factorâ. Anyone who cannot yet drink alcohol, serve on a jury or watch certain films cannot be considered to bear full responsibility for an act â and should therefore not be sentenced to death. From this perspective, age is a protection against harsh sentences. The prosecutor argues the exact opposite: if young people commit serious crimes, their age should not be interpreted in their favour; rather, it should be counted against them. A criminal who is already committing the most serious crimes at an early age must surely be a particularly dangerous criminal. From this perspective, age is a reason for harsh sentences. Obviously, these two assessments of age are diametrically opposed. They are, however, part of a long tradition of conflicting interpretations.
The defence counselâs line of argument follows the tradition that perceives young people as in need of particular protection and as less responsible than adults. This approach shields young people from claims that they require particularly harsh punishments. Despite fairly significant differences in the detail, criminal law systems internationally have one aspect in common: regulations that respond to young offenders with supportive, welfarist and less punitive measures than to adults (Cavadino/Dignan 2006; DĂŒnkel et al. 2010a). This line of argument has existed historically for a relatively long time. Bernard and Kurlychek (2010, 16) refer to âthe code of Moses in the Bibleâ when talking about special youth laws. They also note that the âCode of Hammurabiâ, written 4000 years ago, already stipulated that young people should be treated more leniently than adults. A modern concept of youth crime was then established around 1800 (Bernard/Kurlychek 2010, 34), and the first youth court in the USA started operating in 1899.2 The fundamental principle of this special treatment of young people is a welfarist approach: crime committed by young people is seen as a sign that they need help, and that help is supposed to prevent future crime. At the centre of such reforms is the welfare of the individual child, even above and beyond a response to individual offences (Garland 1985/2018, 21). In reality, it was difficult to respect this principle in practice. It often subjected young people to state control, coercive power and discipline (Oberwittler 2000; Muncie 2015, 266â276). For the young people concerned, it was not always possible to distinguish between help and punishment (Steinacker 2007). However, the core principle is that of help: support is supposed to respond to a young personâs problems and to challenges in his or her environment and thus to address the underlying causes of criminal acts. As those causes exist, a young offender is not fully responsible for offences. Recent neuroscientific findings seem to confirm this, and were cited by the United States Supreme Court in its abovementioned decision that young offenders should be treated with a degree of leniency. The findings suggest that young offenders âare less culpable by definition; that their moral character is fluid; and that they are more amenable to rehabilitation than adult offendersâ (Drinan 2018, 132). This assessment is the basis on which the defence counsel is demanding leniency.
The prosecutorâs line of reasoning follows a different tradition, which argues that young people are particularly dangerous to current society. Moral immaturity and suggestibility are presented as arguments to support restrictive treatment rather than leniency. In criminology, Stanley Cohenâs (1972/2002) analysis of âmoral panicsâ strikingly described the ways in which the conduct of young people can be dramatised, and the punitiveness that can result.3 In this process, in which individual violations of norms are presented in exaggerated terms, social control is extended and problems can be intensified. As Cohen demonstrates, norm violations by young people are a typical subject of âmoral panicsâ. Moral panics also have a long history (Bernard/Kurlychek 2010, 20â21). Historically, young people have repeatedly been criticised for their supposed amorality and violations of the norms (Pearson 1983). Such accusations already featured on clay tablets in 2000 B.C. (Kreuzer 2008, 128), and younger generations are still regularly denounced for the alleged risk they pose to the social and moral order today. Drawing on Pearson, McRobbie and Thornton (1995, 561â562) describe a permanent moral panic:
The same anxieties appear with startling regularity; these involve the immorality of young people, the absence of parental control, the problem of too much free time leading to crime, and the threat which deviant behaviour poses to national identity and labour discipline.
An extreme form of moral indictment has also been significant in the context of the punitive turn of criminal policy in the USA. On the basis of statistical projections in the 1990s, there were predictions that a relatively large number of brutal, unscrupulous young people (âsuper-predatorsâ) would commit serious violent crimes in the near future. John DiIulio (1995) warned of âelementary school youngsters who pack guns instead of lunches. Weâre talking about kids who have absolutely no respect for human life and no sense of the futureâ. Young people were supposedly to become increasingly brutal and ruthless. Yet this predicted wave of cold-blooded young violent offenders did not occur. Serious violent crimes committed by young people in the USA did not increase; in fact, they decreased in the mid- and late 1990s (Zimring 2014). The youthful âsuper-predatorsâ remained a figment of the imaginations of a few individual criminologists, journalists and politicians. Nevertheless, the warning against them was in line with trends towards a punitive turn in US criminal policy, in which offences committed by young people were considered particularly threatening and treated restrictively (Drinan 2018, 5â6; Stevenson 2014, 159â160). In this line of argument, youthfulness does not lead to calls for leniency and rehabilitation, but instead symbolises a dramatic danger that must be neutralised using repressive means. The fact that young offenders are morally immature and can be influenced is acknowledged here just as much as in the welfarist image of youth. However, these assumptions lead in this case to completely different conclusions.4
These two interpretations demonstrate something important: youthfulness as an objectively definable age is largely irrelevant to the way youth crime is perceived.5 Key to understanding youth crime is not the age of an offender, what specific offences have been committed or the frequency of offending over time, but the interpretations of offences and offenders. Narratives on youth crime are not a reflection of a âgenuineâ reality of crime; they are a form of production of that crime reality in their own right. Different, competing narratives exist from which different conclusions can be drawn.
One could argue that scientific findings make it possible to decide which interpretation of youth or youth crime is âcorrectâ. Indeed, there are relevant findings in the field on options for effectively responding to youth crime in the sense of reducing recidivism (e.g. Cullen/Jonson 2011; Howell et al. 2014; Lipsey 2009; Lösel 2012; Welsh/Farrington 2012). Yet, although these findings exist, their relevance to the question of how youth crime is narrated politically and culturally should not be overestimated. Take the case of the âsuper-predatorsâ, for example: statistical findings clearly showed that they were an unsustainable myth, but myths can also shape cultures (Barthes 1972). Even when fear of crime may be unreasonable, it is still âa potent cultural and political forceâ (Pearson 1983, 211). What is key to the political and cultural understanding of youth crime, as I will argue below, is which narratives can be successfully established in face of others. Scientific findings are only one possible point of reference in conflicting narratives. Using the example of US criminal policy, Tonry notes that while many high-quality scientific studies are available to guide criminal policy, those studies have often not been used. âPolicy making on some subjects has occurred mostly in an evidence-free zoneâ (Tonry 2013, 1). Neuroscientific findings are also only relevant to criminal policy if the policy-makers are interested in them and take them seriously. Whether or not this happens follows political, not scientific, principles.
For one illustration, let us go back to the case of Roper v. Simmons. Justice Antonin Scalia disagreed with the decision that young people should be spared the death penalty. In his opinion announcement, he expressed his dissenting opinion as follows, criticising the majority of his fellow judges in the Supreme Court who, in his view, wrongly trusted science:
The court relies selectively on social scientific studies, failing to acknowledge that for every study telling the court what it wants to hear there is another that says the opposite. Indeed there are sometimes contradictory assurances from the same supposedly scientific source.6
This opinion explicitly discredits scientific findings as the basis for criminal policy. In view of the narrow decision â a majority of only five to four judges â in favour of abolishing the death sentence for juveniles in Roper v. Simmons, and in view of the fluctuating and politically influenced make-up of the body of judges in the United States Supreme Court, this is to be taken seriously. Although only an example, it is an unusually transparent illustration that scientific knowledge is not directly applied to non-scientific areas. If we are to understand the political and cultural talk of youth crime, we therefore need to take seriously and to analyse conflictual and historically changing interpretations of youth crime in their own right. This can be done using narrative analysis.
1.1.1 Whose narratives?
Two points need to be clarified before I outline my understanding of narratives and their analysis in more detail in 1.2. If narratives of youth crime are to be analysed, we first need to define whose narratives and over what period.
First, the question of whose narratives is important. We have already seen that politics is crucial to a reconstruction of the interpretations of youth crime. Politics is the most important party in disputes on youth crime, as the legal definition of crime and the determination of how it should be treated are, above all, a matter of politics. The first empirical chapter, Chapter 2, will therefore look at politics.
However, youth crime is not solely a political issue. If youth crime is to be understood as a cultural phenomenon, we need to examine the people who work with the label âyouth crimeâ on a daily basis and manage and apply it in their professional practice: the professionals. They are indispensable to dealing with crime in the long term. Howard Becker (1963, 153) appositely calls them an âenforcement machineryâ that enables the long-term processing of a social problem. Political debates and decisions represent moral attitudes and ideas for dealing with crime, whereas this âmachineryâ perpetuates and modifies them in its daily institutional âsocial problems workâ (Holstein/Miller 2003; Miller/Holstein 1997; see also Lipsky 2010; Maynard-Moody/Musheno 2003). The machinery ensures that certain conceptualisations of crime last and appear persistently legitimate. I select two occupations from the relevant professionals. Firstly, the police as a central criminal justice institution. Its relevance in the area of crime and youth crime is undisputed. Secondly, social work, as an institution that is of key importance in the field of youth crime in particular (Gensing 2010, 1605â1609). Internationally, one characteristic feature of approaches to offences by young people is that special attention is to be paid to the personality of offenders (DĂŒnkel et al. 2010a). Trials of young people focus not just on individual acts but also on young people as persons (Emerson 1969; Rap/Weijers 2014). Welfarist institutions such as social work are supposed to support this approach. It is precisely this support function of welfare professionals that comes under pressure from calls for increasingly punitive respon...
