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Extending the long arm of the law: punishment and rehabilitation as motives of public support for handling violent juvenile offenders as adults

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Abstract

Objectives

To assess variation in public support for involving violent juvenile offenders in the adult criminal justice system based on the mechanism of that involvement—waiver or blended sentencing—and whether the sentence is described as emphasizing punishment or rehabilitation.

Methods

Participants read a vignette describing a violent, repeat juvenile offender and were told he would normally receive a sentence in the juvenile system that emphasized punishment and accountability. Each participant was subsequently randomly assigned to receive information about one of seven alternative sentencing schemes that varied the venue and emphasis. The dependent variable measured willingness to pay additional taxes for the alternative.

Results

Willingness to pay varied significantly across conditions. Respondents were willing to pay relatively more for a juvenile sentence that emphasized rehabilitation than for any provision for waiver or a blended sentence. These results held even after controlling for the perceived appropriateness of the sentence length.

Conclusions

People are willing to involve violent juvenile offenders in the adult criminal justice system, but they prefer juvenile justice sentences and an emphasis on rehabilitation.

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Notes

  1. This finding is consistent with a long line of research that has shown public support for both punitive and rehabilitative correctional policies, in the aggregate, for adults as well as juveniles (Cullen et al., 2000; Jonson et al., 2013).

  2. A test of proportional odds indicated that this assumption was violated, χ2(12, N = 1494) = 105.93, p < .01). Additional investigation revealed that the source of the violation was an inability to distinguish willingness to pay $50 from the other bid amounts, which we believe reflects the relatively small number of responses in this category (N = 93). Because the other three bid amounts fit parallel lines, we report ordinal logistic regression results rather than less parsimonious multinomial results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29208, USA

    Brandon K. Applegate

  2. Department of Criminal Justice, Radford University, Radford, VA, 24142, USA

    Riane M. Bolin

  3. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, 40292, USA

    Heather M. Ouellette

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  1. Brandon K. Applegate
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  2. Riane M. Bolin
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  3. Heather M. Ouellette
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Correspondence to Brandon K. Applegate.

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Applegate, B.K., Bolin, R.M. & Ouellette, H.M. Extending the long arm of the law: punishment and rehabilitation as motives of public support for handling violent juvenile offenders as adults. J Exp Criminol 19, 1001–1019 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-022-09518-w

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