Understanding public views of youth crime and the youth justice system

Abstract

Most (94%) of the stories about youth crime appearing in a sample of Toronto newspapers involved cases of violence. Youth court statistics, in contrast, showed that fewer than a quarter of youth court cases in Ontario involved violence. The newspapers focused largely on the crime, the charge laid against the young person, and the impact of the crime on victims. Legal reports of youth court dispositions, on the other hand, focused more on characteristics of the youth. Although readers of Toronto newspapers receive almost no information about youth court dispositions, a survey of Toronto residents demonstrated that most people believe that youth court dispositions are too lenient. When asked to indicate what kinds of cases they were thinking of. most of those who thought that youth court dispositions were too lenient were thinking of a minority of cases: those involving serious violent repeat offenders. Respondents also had very little accurate knowledge of the operation of the youth court in Canada, underestimating the severity of dispositions available to the court under the law. They also believed that the courts were much more constrained than they are in their ability to transfer cases to adult court. The view that youth courts are too lenient can best be thought of as a general "belief", more linked to general views about crime and the criminal justice system than it is to knowledge or facts about youth crime and the youth justice system.