Toward Eliminating the Jericho Road: Privatisation, Responsibility and Delinquency

Abstract

Criminologists studying the causes of juvenile crime, and the more modern brand of sociologist studying the process of becoming deviant, rarely invoke the concepts of responsibility and irresponsibility. This is in marked contrast to philosophers, lawyers, politicians and laymen debating what to do about juvenile crime, for whom the question of whether or not the young offender is responsible is crucial. Social scientists tend to feel that to enter the debate is to abandon their scientific neutrality, and so they steer clear of it. But in so doing, they considerably reduce the relevance of their researches to the policy debate about juvenile crime, and it is left to laymen to assume or decide for themselves what are the implications of criminological and sociological researches for the responsibility or lack of it of the young offender; frequently they assume that any social scientific explanation renders the actor not responsible for his actions (a logically curious deduction, but one which social scientists by their silence do little to assuage).