Shame, forgiveness, and juvenile justice

Abstract

The question of how best to deal with juvenile delinquency, and with crimes committed by young offenders, raises wider issues. Debates about juvenile justice are rarely concerned only with young people and are rarely confined to questions of managing the criminal justice system. Historically, concerning deviant children have been at the moral center of debate crime, poverty and education.(1) The question of whether, and how, the state should punish deviant children raises further fundamental questions in moral and political philosophy. It raises a question about the appropriate balance between retribution and rehabilitation--or indeed, about whether either of these approaches is adequate. It raises a question about the divide between a public sphere governed by common and statutory laws and a private sphere governed by family rules. It is part of the debate about the relationship between rights and obligations. In addition, juvenile justice has been a testing ground for criminological theory. Smaller-scale explanations of crime, focussing on psychological or social variables, have been tested empirically with increasingly sophisticated data analysis as the criminology industry has expanded. Young people have regularly been the subject of such tests. After several decades of research, there is still no clear consensus on whether juvenile delinquency is primarily a symptom of inadequate internal self-control or whether it is primarily a symptom of inadequate external social control. Hence the renewed call for an interdisciplinary approach in criminology.(2) An interdisciplinary approach would seek to transcend this impasse between sociology's over socialized conception of the individual and psychology's focus on fixed character traits.(3) It would seek to understand better the system of social and political rules within which individuals interact. It would give as much weight to human passions as it does to human reason. A successful interdisciplinary approach to juvenile justice would, in other words, seek to overcome the divide between the social sciences and the humanities; it would integrate recent advances in psychology and sociology with contemporary thinking in moral and political theory. One would expect proposals for public policy to flow from an integrated theory of this sort. In this paper, however, I intend to proceed in the reverse order. I am not proposing to integrate existing theories and then to suggest new public policies in juvenile justice. Rather, I wish to describe an existing model of dealing with young offenders and then to consider its broader implications. As with earlier debates about juvenile justice, the issues raised by this model of dealing with young offenders extend more generally to criminology, moral philosophy, and political theory. The Family Group Conference in Theory and Practice The core of the model at issue here is currently operating throughout New Zealand/Aotearoa. It has also been introduced in a modified form in parts of Australia. Its central component is a process known as the Family Group Conference (F G C). When New Zealand's national parliament passed legislation in 1989 adopting the Family Group Conference process for dealing with young offenders and their victims, one of its primary aims was to achieve a system of justice that was culturally appropriate to the country's Maori and Pacific Island Polynesian population.(4) However, the process would appear to be broadly applicable to virtually any juvenile justice system. The basic design of the Family Group Conference is disarmingly simple. A young person who has committed an offense against an identifiable victim is brought face to face with that victim. (There may be more than one offender or more than one victim; a single conference deals with the effects of the offense.) Both offender(s) and victim(s) are accompanied by family members, guardians, peers, or other people with a significant relationship to the offender or the victim. …