Book Review: Punishing juveniles: Principle and critique
| Author | Alexes Harris |
| Published date | 01 January 2005 |
| Date | 01 January 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/146247450500700118 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
claim that victims are interested in asserting their rights only to get revenge on their
assailants. Dubber dismisses the heated emotional responses of victims or their family
members to those who have treated them or their loved ones badly as ‘acting out’ rather
than ‘processing’ the crisis of victimization. This account of the passions expressed by
victims is unconvincing, particularly as Dubber gives no indication that he appreciates
the complexity of human psychology. However, Dubber could not take up even
Nussbaum’s relatively benign argument that emotions are special kinds of judgments,
specifically judgments about external states of affairs that acknowledge our own need-
iness and incompleteness before parts of the world we do not fully control, without
admitting that autonomy is not so much a capacity of personhood as an ideologically
inspired aspiration. Ultimately, what disappoints in Dubber’s view of personhood is that
he fails to approach the received idea (and value) of autonomy with the same skepti-
cism that he shows for the philosophical foundations (and value) of the state. If he had
considered a more complex characterization of the person, one that incorporated rather
than rejected out of hand an affective dimension of personhood that operates accord-
ing to a logic that the rational mind does not apprehend but that sets the stage for being
with others, the effects of his revision of criminal law might not simply have boiled
down to a limit on the scope of the criminal justice system but instead might have
provided us with some insight into the system’s limits.
Jennifer L. Culbert
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA
Punishing juveniles: Principle and critique, Ido Weijers and Antony Duff (eds). Portland,
OR: Hart Publishing, 2002. 215 pp. ISBN 1–84113–284–5.
This edited volume is a three-part exploration of important themes in contemporary
juvenile justice. The first section explores the historical, political and social trends
leading to the creation of juvenile justice systems internationally. For example in
Chapter 2, Junger-Tas presents a review of past and present trends in Western society;
how societies existed and treated delinquents prior to the creation of a juvenile court.
The discussion of the commonalities and dissimilarities of the characteristics of the
juvenile court over the Western world is a fresh perspective not commonly provided in
current juvenile justice literature. Junger-Tas also discusses important changes in the
underlying philosophy of juvenile justice internationally, paying particular attention to
the rise of the societal call for retribution and accountability of young offenders which
has been manifested in several comparable youth offender acts in the United States,
Canada, the Netherlands and England.
The second section of the book provides a solid review and discussion of perspec-
tives on education, punishment and restorative justice. The three chapters focus on the
role of moral communication in court proceedings. Walgrave argues that we should
reject the punishment paradigm in criminal justice and focus on communicative restora-
tion programs to heal the wrong done by offenders. He argues the emphasis of legal
proceedings should be on the harm done, thus characteristics of the offender, such as
age, are irrelevant. Only one criminal justice system is necessary as long as it is flexible
in its sentencing practices to recognize the capacities and strengths of the offender. Duff
BOOK REVIEWS
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