Dealing with delinquency
June Lait
One of the advantages of living in what I was about to call a primitive society (but since so many words one was wont to use without inhibition touch someone or other on the raw these days, I had better call an underdeveloped society), was that most people didn't know how old they were. Having produced a son in England, and received polite congratulations or commiseration as he passed or failed to pass landmarks like cutting teeth or walking at the appropriate time, it was a delight to rear a daughter in the relaxed atmosphere of rural Tanganyika (as it then was). There no one knew or cared how old she, or for that matter I was, and it occurred to me that had my son been born there instead of in hygienic England I should probably have been spared one of life's minor humiliations, to be labelled in my hospital bed 'elderly primagravida' at the age of twentyseven. I am ashamed to confess that one of our achievements in Tanganyika was to stare into the mouths of likely youths (rather as one does with horses) to see if they were eighteen, and therefore required to pay poll tax, a necessary underpinning for an embryonically interventionist society. I now realise other bits of anatomy denote age more reliably, but in those unenlightened days it was not considered seemly to inspect them.
My husband was employed to administer, of all things, a probation service in a tribal society which had only one town of any size, and an administration characterised more by aspiration than achievement. The forms and questionnaires which he was obliged to use in his work were of the kind that Evelyn Waugh also encountered in Africa, where it was thought relevant to inquire of the sex of his grandmother. When we made tracks for home, we managed to convince each other that being a probation officer was only farcical some of the time. Now, twenty years on, neither of us is so sure.
Professor Parsloe, whose book Juvenile Justice in Britain and the United States: the balance of needs and rights (Routledge and
Kegan Paul E7.25) is published this week, does not express doubt. She has been a probation officer, and is now Professor of Social Work at Bristol University, in the School of Applied Social Studies. Her book, which in contrast to much sociological literature is clearly written and well referenced, compares the dispensation of juvenile justice in England, Scotland, and the USA. It packs in a lot of facts about history, legislation and personnel, but Professor Parsloe does not tell us how each of the countries she writes about defines the status of 'juvenile', though various definitions are implicit in the legislation she details. This is an important omission, since policy makers in developed countries suffer from chronic ambivalence about the degree of protection and/or privilege to be afforded to children. What logic unites the granting of full adult status at eighteen with a paternalistic insistence on captive learning until sixteen, at which age free contraception and abortion will have been on offer without parental consent for some time?
Professor Parsloe discerns three approaches to juvenile justice, those of the criminal justice, the welfare and the community. The first is the one most of us know about, understand, and, dare one say, support. Its proponents want a stable society, see deviance as a threat to such a society, and consider that offenders (even most juveniles) know what they are doing and are likely to be deterred by the likelihood of detection and punishment. The welfare approach is concerned with what people are rather than what they do, and sees an offence as a manifestation of a disturbed psyche rather than as a wilful act. Its proponents believe in treatment rather than punishment, and are to be found in large numbers in the social work profession making a living out of this belief. The community approach sees delinquency as a necessary component of a corrupt capitalist society, asserting that capitalists need deviants to make the rest of us unite in defence of capitalism.
In the juvenile court all three approaches are represented, and the book charts the interaction of lawyers, social workers, magistrates, and police in three countries. Professor Parsloe's approach is commonsense, practical, descriptive, and singularly innocent of any theoretical framework. This is appropriate in one who teaches social work, which some regard as a non-subject and many suspect has no knowledge base.
In the absence of a conceptual framework one selects the nuggets from the book which best confirm one's own prejudices (perhaps one does this anyway, but a book like this makes it easier). 'Juvenile justice has been noticeable for the gap between its rhetoric and its reality. The rhetoric tends to be that of welfare; whereas the reality has often proved to be cruelly punitive and deterrent.' Perhaps Professor Parsloe is thinking of benevolent measures like the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act, one of whose aims was to prevent juveniles being committed to custodial institutions like approved schools. Since these were euphemistically restyled 'Community Homes' their enlightened staff have been able to reject 'disruptive' children, and more children than ever have been detained in prisons or other high security institutions. So much for official benevolence. Or again: 'Each time an institution is set up to deal with troublesome children so as to avoid the stigma attached to the existing procedure, the new institution itself becomes stigmatised in time'. Could it perhaps be that the behaviour itself is stigmatising, or to put it in layman's terms, that ordinary people, not having benefited from social work training, respond to delinquency with hostility rather than with sympathy, and expect it to be punished rather than rewarded?
Although I say that Professor Parsloe's work is atheoretical, the two quotations I have chosen show her at least making generalisations. From these and many others scattered about the book-it might be possible to construct an hypothesis that ran something like this. 'The welfare and community approaches to delinquency are invalid because they are not held by cynics'. (Ambrose Bierce's kind of cynic of course, a blackguard who sees things not as they ought to be, but as they are.) To test this hypothesis it would be necessary to dismantle Professor Parsloe and her department and the whole apparatus of so-called welfare which has accreted to justice over the years and see if anyone (except of course Professor Parsloe et a/) was worse off. One thing is certain, the taxpayer would not be. For that reason alone the hypothesis might be worth testing. If Karl Popper is right that history is the story of the unintended effects of man's intended actions — and the history of official benevolence seems to confirm this view — we might find that the best way to benefit criminals is to stop trying so hard.
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