Treatment Versus Punishment

Treatment Versus Punishment: That Is the Question!
Introduction
When it comes to the question of whether treatment or punishment should be used for juvenile offenders, it is important to remember that juveniles are still developing into adults: their minds, bodies, impulses and cognitive processes are still in formation phases and they do not have the kind of control that one might expect or assume of an adult. Juveniles are children, in other words, and if a child is ever thrown into a cage society is more than likely to label it child abuse. Yet every year children are tried and punished for crimes as though they were adults. While sometimes punitive approaches to juvenile justice may be necessary in order to teach a lesson, they should not be on the scale of what they are for adults. The focus of juvenile justice should be on rehabilitation—not punishment. This paper will explain why treatment is the better option when it comes to juvenile justice.
Differences between Treatment and Punishment
The concept of treatment focuses on the idea that juveniles who commit a crime, whether it is selling drugs, robbing a house, rape, or murder, are still children and they should be viewed as children who are in serious need of help. The justice system should adopt a more humane approach to juveniles because they are still in a developmental process. As one ages, the phases of development stretch out and last for many more years (Santrock, 2019). According to Erikson’s psychosocial theory of development human beings develop in psychosocial stages and are motivated by a social desire or need to be with other people (Santrock, 2019). For juveniles, the phases of development are intense and confusing and if they are not properly guided by peers, family, groups and media they may make very bad decisions and give themselves over to bad impulses and evil influences. Children need a helping and guiding hand to navigate the conflicts that they face in the early stages of development. Treatment is what provides that helping hand. It can come in the form of therapy, mentoring, a Big Brother, a new family, rehabilitation, restorative justice, and so on.
Punishment is much different. It is what happens when a child misbehaves. The authority punishes the child to show the child that such behavior is unacceptable. This is fine and necessary, but the problem with the justice system is that punishments are blown way out of proportion (Meli, 2014). Lives are ruined because the justice system wants to send a stern message to offenders and potential offenders that their behavior will not be tolerated. That message, however, has to be tempered with empathy, sympathy and humanity—otherwise the culture of decay will never reverse course and the collapse of society will only continue.
Types of Treatment
Types of treatment include: counseling, prevention programs, and cognitive behavioral therapy, education, and psychological therapy (National Institute of Justice, 2019). These types of treatment tend to promote rehabilitation and to assist the juvenile offender in growing into a responsible, accountable adult. The aim of them is to promote prosocial attitudes. As Fritz (2015) points out, diverting children away from incarceration is a service to them and to the community because it promotes a more humane vision of what society should be about and it demonstrates to the juvenile that the world is not out to get them as they are likely to be thinking based on their experiences and environment up to that point, as Agnew (2008) posits when applying Strain Theory to why juveniles engage in crime.
Types of Punishment
Types of punishment include: incarceration, home confinement, electronic monitoring, community service, probation, diversion programs (though this can also fall under the treatment category in some cases), or placement in a foster home. Punishment does not aid in the reduction of recidivism rates, as restorative and rehabilitative forms of justice have been found to do (Wong, Bouchard, Gravel, Bouchard & Morselli, 2016). Therefore, it should be avoided or at the very least used in moderation and not applied as though it were a fix-all or the only option worth pursuing.
For the Crime of Murder by Juveniles
When a juvenile commits a murder it is something that needs to be taken most seriously and there should be an element of punishment involved, lest the child fail to develop a sense of justice. Justice dictates that punishment must be received. However, the punishment should by no means mean that the child must spend 10, 20 or 30 years in prison well into adulthood. That is what happened with Anthony Rolon: he spent half his adult life in prison for a murder he committed as a juvenile—a murder that was provoked by an aggressor and urged on by peers (Cramer, 2014). Instead of wasting away in prison, juveniles need to be treated—not just punished—especially when the crime is something as serious as murder.
In Las Vegas, Nevada, the prevailing thought and law is that a child who is 16 years or old must be tried as an adult if murder is committed (Nevada Legislative Counsel Bureau, 2016). This means that just because the offense is serious the justice system loses all sense of the perpetrator and the neglects to consider that the offender is still a child in development. In Los Angeles, California, the prevailing thought is the same. In fact, until recently, California tried juveniles aged 14 and up as adults when they committed murder (Diskin, 2018).
Thus the prevailing thought in both Las Vegas (my jurisdiction) and Los Angeles is that punishment is the way to go for juveniles who are of a certain age. In essence, both jurisdictions redefine at what age a child is an adult based on the degree of seriousness of the crime. This is an inherently disordered approach to justice and betrays a desire of the justice system overall to want to punish serious crimes rather than treat the perpetrators. As Troutman (2018) points out, juveniles do not yet have the fully-formed sense of self-awareness and self-control that is assumed of adults—so they should not be tried as adults just because they commit serious crimes. They are still children.
Is the Recidivism Rate a Good Indicator of Success?
The recidivism rate is a good indicator of whether one approach is more successful than another. However, it is not the only indicator, and in cases where juveniles are tried as adults for crimes like murder and locked away for the next three decades of their lives, recidivism rates are not going to indicate much because the convicted child will be in jail for thirty years. There is not going to be much opportunity to commit crimes.
A better indicator may be the growth and development of the mental health of the child as he receives treatment while incarcerated for the crime of murder. This can be measured by a psychologist, therapist or counselor and reviewed by the Board. The child can be interviewed and reviewers can assess the child’s development into a responsible adult by looking at behavioral reports while in prison, and so on. As Smith (2013) notes, there are a variety of ways to determine whether an intervention or approach to justice is effective—just like one can see how community-based justice can positively impact society in various ways, such as looking at education enrollment, jobs, and community stability.
However, recidivism rates are a good indicator when they are available. For instance, from 2001 to 2013, there was a 53% drop in juvenile incarceration throughout America and the cause was attributed to the type of diversionary and rehabilitative programs implemented by states like Texas, California, New York and others (McCarthy, Schiraldi & Shark, 2016). Yet, Walsh and Weber (2014) show that only 39 of the 50 U.S. states actually track recidivism rates and half of them only track it by using re-arrest and re-incarceration as the trigger. Even fewer states track recidivism risk. The reality is that tracking recidivism and the risk of recidivism among juveniles is not a top priority for many U.S. states.
The Most Effective Strategies for Reducing Juvenile Crime Rates
According to Jannetta and Okeke (2017), one of the best ways to reduce juvenile crime rates is to reduce juveniles’ exposure to crime. As Sharkey (2010) shows, children who are exposed to murders are impacted deeply in terms of their cognitive abilities. Being exposed to murder disrupts their cognitive development processes and makes it harder for them to understand the repercussions of actions. Today, children are exposed to murder in media, in real life, and in other ways. If one wants to reduce juvenile crime rates, one has to do something about the culture—there is too much murder in the culture and that impacts the way young people think and act.
Aside from that, however, there are practical steps that can be taken to reduce juvenile crime rates. These include reducing the justice system footprint by not over-enforcing minor offenses, reducing the severity of punishment for minor offenses and using rehabilitative and restorative justice as an alternative, as this has been shown to be effective in reducing juvenile crime rates (Johnson et al., 2015). Johnson et al. (2015) have found, in fact, that restorative justice programs are very effective at lowering recidivism rates: among individuals who completed a restorative justice program, the recidivism rate fell by 26% against a 10% drop in recidivism rates among individuals who went through the traditional justice system (Johnson et al., 2015).
Thus, the research appears to support alternative forms of justice, such as rehabilitative programs and restorative justice. However, restorative justice is a program that works more with lower level offenses. It is not something commonly used with serious offenses like murder. For murder, most juveniles aged 16 or older will be tried and treated as adults. This is the problem that has to be addressed. The strategy should be a combination of punitive and rehabilitation methods, with the majority of focus on rehabilitation. Oftentimes it is simply a matter of getting the young person out of the environment in which he was because the environment is typically the primary cause for the crime—the key agitator or trigger, as was the case with Anthony Rolon and with other teens who are pushed into crime as a result of peers, environment or strain (Agnew, 2008).
As Jannetta and Okeke (2017) show, another strategy that can work for more serious crimes like murder is to “integrate a positive youth development framework into juvenile and adult criminal justice policies” (p. 12). There are, however, other options that are being explored, including decarceration, but they are still in the study stages. Decarceration does pose a positive concept, though, as many juveniles are left without parental guidance because parents are locked in prison and trapped in the same justice system. Jannetta and Okeke (2017) state that decarceration in the adult system “would yield benefits to young adults, as well as juveniles with incarcerated parents” and that there are several national programs and initiatives that have been started to address this issue, including the Justice Reinvestment Initiative and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, “which is changing the way jails are used” (p. 14). The best strategy going forward is to focus on positive youth development for serious offenders.
Treatment and a focus on anti-violence efforts among populations most at risk for committing crimes of violence and murder is where the best interventions are going to be found (Jannetta & Okeke, 2017). Treatment should be made mandatory for teens who commit murder. They may need to be incarcerated and will likely require some form of punitive justice so that they understand the seriousness of their crime, but there are ways the justice system can go about handling this without destroying the young person’s life. Treatment through therapy, counseling, and other support services would help to rehabilitate the individual and make it possible for that person to leave the justice system with a greater sense of humanity, decency and accountability. It should be a case by case approach—not a general, one-size-fits-all strategy. For juveniles who are hardened criminals and indicate a clear sociopathic tendency, there should be other options available.
Essentially, however, the justice system has to adopt a treatment-oriented perspective because punitive justice merely leads to further breakdowns in society. The U.S. has the highest prison population in the world and that is a shameful reflection of the type of justice that the criminal justice system has implemented. Too many people are being incarcerated, and the reason for this is simple: the prison industrial complex is a business and these incarcerated prisoners are used as cheap labor for companies that pay them pennies on the dollar for their labor. The idea of justice is used to mask over what is going on here. That is where all of this needs to change.
Conclusion
In summation, the concept of treatment best supports the overarching concept of social justice. Social justice is about doing what is right for all stakeholders; it is about helping communities to grow and develop. But communities cannot grow and develop if fathers and sons, mothers and daughters are all being incarcerated, one generation after another. It only creates an endless cycle of recidivism. That cycle needs to end so that communities can begin to heal, so that communities and individuals alike can begin to take responsibility and hold themselves accountable for what goes on in their own neighborhoods. The concept of restorative justice is one that should be pursued, even for serious crimes like murder, whenever possible. People should begin to think about how they view others, even those who have offended them. Justice does not have to exclude forgiveness. It does not have to be completely punitive. It can combine punitive measures with treatment. In the case of serious crimes, that may be what juveniles require. However, they should never be tried as adults; the justice system has to remember that these are children: they are still developing and they need to be treated for the issues that are impacting them negatively.
References
Agnew, R. (2008). Strain Theory. In V. Parrillo (Ed.), Encyclopedia of social problems. (pp. 904-906). Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Cramer, M. (2014). Parole Board releases 2nd man convicted of murder as juvenile. Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/08/06/parole-board-releases-man-convicted-murder-while-juvenile/REwVVe3aR9leuRVMpZsN6O/story.html
Diskin, M. (2018). New law will put limits. Retrieved from https://www.vcstar.com/story/news/local/2018/10/11/new-california-law-means-teen-suspect-oxnard-murders-cannot-tried-adult/1535518002/
Fritz, J. K. (2015). Diverting young offenders from prison is ‘smart justice.’ Education Digest, 81(2), 53-55.
Jannetta, J., & Okeke, C. (2017). Strategies for Reducing Criminal and Juvenile Justice Involvement. Building Ladders of Opportunity for Young People in the Great Lakes States, brief, 4. Retrieved from https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/94516/strategies-for-reducing-criminal-and-juvenile-justice-involvement_2.pdf
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McCarthy, P., Schiraldi, V., & Shark, M. (2016). The future of youth justice: A community-based alternative to the youth prison model. US Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, National Institute of Justice.
Meli, L. (2014). Hate Crime and Punishment: Why Typical Punishment Does Not Fit the Crime. U. Ill. L. Rev., 921.
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Nevada Legislative Counsel Bureau. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.leg.state.nv.us/Division/Research/Publications/PandPReport/31-JJ.pdf
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Smith, C. (2013). Nothing about us without us! The failure of the modern juvenile justice system and a call for community-based justice. Journal of Applied Research on Children, 4(1). Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/childrenatrisk/
Troutman, B. (2018). A more just system of juvenile justice: Creating a new standard of accountability for juveniles in Illinois. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, 108(1), 197. Retrieved from https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc/
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