Lay explanations of delinquency: global or offence-specific?

Framed Attributions and Shaped Accounts: A Study of Dispositional Process in Juvenile Justice

Drawing from an actual case that was set for a revocation-of-probation hearing, and using an interactionist conception, this article analyzes how juvenile probation officers (JPOs) impute attributes, advocate dispositions, and offer justifying accounts for their recommendations. Controlling for case and context effects, it examines how these officers frame their attributions and shape the justifications of their recommendations to accomplish their dispositions. It was found that delinquent attributions, although they are negotiated with language appropriate to the ideals of individualized juvenile justice and rehabilitation, often parallel the decision-making process in the adult parole system. Although the proposed dispositions and their accompanying remedial intentions vary among the individual officers, it is demonstrated that once an officer is committed to a preferred disposition for a marginal case he or she will expend considerable and judicious effort in attempts to secure that disposition from the court. It is proposed that this individual JPO commitnent may represent the key to more successful juvenile justice intervention.

South African Adolescents' Explanations for Juvenile Delinquency

Research in other parts of the world suggests that adolescents invoke a multiplicity of causes to explain juvenile offending. The extent to which the different explanations are endorsed appears partly to be a function of cultural and demographic characteristics. The aim of this study was to investigate South African adolescents' explanations for delinquency and to examine cultural differences in these explanations. A total of 554 secondary school pupils from two Eastern Cape high schools rated 39 explanations for juvenile offending on a Likert scale. Principal component analysis and a varimax rotation of the responses identified seven factors - Home Environment, Antisocial Tendency, Influencability, Social Control, Emotional Adjustment, Deprivation and Social Alienation. The results showed that there were large differences between the Black and White learners in terms of the perceived importance of a number of the explanatory causes.

Attitudes toward women and rape among male adolescents convicted of sexual versus nonsexual crimes

Adolescence is an important period in the development of adult sexual offending against women, yet it has received little attention in research on attitudes toward women and rape. The present study used the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) and Burt's (1980) Rape Myth Acceptance Scale (BRMAS) to compare the attitudes of 31 male adolescents convicted of sexual assaults on women (rape, attempted rape, indecent assault) with the attitudes of 27 male adolescents convicted of nonsexual violent crimes. The results showed no significant difference between the two groups on either measure. Furthermore, a more traditional, conservative attitude toward women, as measured on the AWS, did not significantly correlate with the endorsement of rape myths as measured on the BRMAS. The findings are discussed with reference to the validity and reliability of these measures when used with adolescents.