On Punishing Juvenile Offenders
Where Does Retributivism Go Wrong?
Perica Jovchevski (TU Delft - Technology, Policy and Management)
Giorgia Brucato (CEU: Central European University)
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Abstract
This chapter challenges the coherence of the purely retributivist framework of justifying more lenient punishment for juvenile offenders relative to adults for identical crimes. We begin by discussing three theses which, in our opinion, distinguish retributivist from other justifications of punishment and point to an exception from two of them which retributivists commonly grant: namely, that juvenile offenders should be treated differently than adults by the criminal legal systems for the same crimes and be subject to more lenient punitive, non-punitive, or a complex of punitive and non-punitive measures. While intuitively plausible, we claim that retributivists are far from being at ease with the reasons for the exception. We consider two responses they commonly offer: the arguments from (a) moral responsibility and (b) participation in a political community, but conclude that none of them offers a plausible justification for the ascription of more lenient punishment to young offenders of criminal age. In the last section, we start from the retributivist failure to justify the differential treatment and argue that our intuition for lesser punishment of children should be justified based on forward-looking considerations, unavailable to pure retributivists, which we believe in some circumstances also grant lesser punishment to adults as well.