Receiving Police Cautioning

Abstract

To date there has been no systematic research on the experience of police cautioning from the viewpoint of the young people and their families. In a welfarist rhetoric, young people are given a police caution — a second chance — rather than being sucked into the formal court system. The notion of progress in pre-court diversion is often underlined by its claim to remove children from the criminalizing ethos of the court and the potentially damaging effects of stigmatization and labelling. Furthermore, there is an implicit assumption that the informal handling of delinquents (as in the Scottish Children Hearings System) may promote parental involvement and a sense of partnership between the state and the parents of offending children (National Youth Agency, 1991; NACRO, 1994). In practice, does police cautioning really represent an alternative to court? Or has it simply altered the place and meaning of punishment in the criminal justice system? Do young people and their parents regard police cautioning as a ‘soft option’, as critics in favour of giving cautioning ‘some teeth’ often claim? Do they accept the service role of the police in preventing young people from getting into trouble? This chapter seeks to address these questions by drawing on observations of police cautioning sessions and a series of interviews with the police, and those juveniles and their parents who received a caution at the station.