All My Children

Children Conscience and Punishment

The first thing to realise about juvenile delinquency is that it’s not one type of misbehaviour but an overall term for everything for which an adolescent may be haled into court, from parking offences to murder. It’s as if everything that an adult could do wrong were called adult turpitude, a label which would certainly hinder rather than aid the understanding of different types of adult offences. The reason why all juvenile offences have been lumped together has been to get young people into special courts where, it was hoped, their difficulties could be understood and dealt with constructively rather than punitively; if they had to be removed temporarily from society, they would not be jailed with confirmed adult criminals but placed in rehabilitation institutions.

The question of conscience is important in any discussion of delinquency—the conscience of the individual, of the members of his family and of the social group to which the family belongs. The burglar or robber has a defective conscience. You can be sure that he was raised either by parents who had defective consciences too, or else by parents who didn’t love him much; he may have resented this and never had the motive to try to live up to their standards. To put it positively, the reason most people behave well most of the time is that as young children they were warmed and comforted by their parents‘ love; they felt miserable when their parents temporarily disapproved of them; so they wanted, most of the time anyway, to retain that love by being good. Also they wanted very much to grow up to be like their parents and this meant doing things properly, too. People do not do the right things primarily because of fear of punishment. Punishment is only a vigorous reminder of disapproval. If the person being punished has never been loved enough to care whether he’s approved of or not, the punishment does no good. This is shown by all the confirmed criminals who commit new crimes almost as soon as they get out of jail.

As you grow up you want to be approved of also by teachers, bosses, friends and society generally. Conscience is what tells you what your parents and society will and will not approve of.

The consciences of people in different social groups are not the same Attitudes towards truancy are an example of this. In the family in which the parents left school as soon as they were able and see no great point in education, the average teenage son may not have much respect for schooling and may not be a particularly good student. Also, in such families the parents are apt to give up trying to control their children when they get beyond the stage when they can be punished physically. When a boy with no respect for education becomes physically full grown by fourteen or fifteen, he may have no patience with a female teacher who scolds him in front of others, and he may simply refuse to come back for more. His family may not try to persuade him to return, either. This contrasts with the family with high expectations where the parents control mainly by instilling in their children’s consciences a strong sense of social and moral obligation which persists through adolescence and adulthood. They do this by frequently reminding their children of what is approved and disapproved—by society, by church, by family. They emphasise the long-term consequences of failure to live up to the expectation of their level of society; for example, that poor results in school mean no further education, an inferior job, painful loss of respect from others and self.

To the boy brought up by parents who’ve always expected him to go to university, staying away from school would be a serious crime which he wouldn’t dare commit unless he were intensely resentful about some injustice committed by the school authorities or unless he had been raised with a defective conscience.

In one social group, any stealing or cheating is looked on with horror. But in another it’s not considered immoral to help yourself to some of the products of the factory, or goods at the shop, where you work. A majority of university students consider it all right to cheat an organisation (e.g., an insurance company) but not an individual. (This seems shocking as well as shortsighted to me.) In England they say you can leave a suitcase unattended indefinitely on a small- town railway-station platform, but in plenty of other countries it would be gone in ten minutes.

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