On confession, repentance, and responsibility in the Uruguayan juvenile justice system

Abstract

The article debates the notion of responsibility regarding the Judeo-Christian ideas of confession and repentance used by professionals of the Uruguayan juvenile justice system. The study follows a critical model of qualitative studies through an empirical and contextualized research process, based on discourse analysis of a sample of case files and interviews. Results show the coexistence of different theoretical-methodological conceptions among the technicians, in which parental blame for the adolescent offense prevails, search for responsibility for the act committed associated with confession and repentance, opposed to an attitude of patient listening of a person going through adolescence, promoting reflexivity without adult impositions. The conclusion is that, in an early secularized country like Uruguay, the conception of responsibility is used as a synonym of the religious idea of guilt, with its correlates of confession and repentance with consequences on the judicially imposed forms of punishment, perceived as expiatory of the adolescent infraction to penal law.