The lead article in this month's issue of the American Psychologist is an article titled Are Adolescents Less Mature than Adults? The article attempts to reconcile the contradictory positions of the American Psychological Association highlighted by Justice Scalia in his dissent in Roper v. Simmons:
[T]he American Psychological Association (APA), which claims in this case that scientific evidence shows persons under 18 lack the ability to take moral responsibility for their decisions, has previously taken precisely the opposite position before this very Court. In its brief in Hodgson v. Minnesota, 497 U.S. 417 (1990), the APA found a "rich body of research" showing that juveniles are mature enough to decide whether to obtain an abortion without parental involvement.Since those lines were laid to text, the American Psychological Association has tried to defend its position that when it comes to obtaining an abortion, the scientific evidence shows that adolescents posses the cognitive capacity to make that choice free from parental consent yet when it comes to the criminal punishment, juveniles as a categorical group, are insufficiently mature to be subject to the full range of criminal sanctions available under the law. The article in this month's American Psychologist claims to demonstrate how these positions are compatible despite the robust intuition that they simply can't be.
Simmons at 617 (Scalia, J. dissenting)
To accomplish this feat, the authors suggest that when it comes to
decisions about abortion, what matters are abilities that they call cognitive
capacity. These are considered abilities which permit logical reasoning about moral, social, and interpersonal matters and can be sufficiently measured by examining working memory, verbal fluency, and short-term memory. Likewise, they posit that when it comes to decisions related to criminal matters - such as whether it is legally and morally wrong to murder someone, as Simmons did - those abilities reflect more on psychosocial maturity. And those latter abilities are under-developed in most adolescents.
But what is psychosocial maturity? The authors suggest that it is a constellation of capacities which surround risk perception, sensation seeking, impulsivity, peer influence, and future orientation. They further suggest that these abilities are necessary for legitimate proportionality of punishment - that punishment must be commensurate with culpability. Yet these deficits in maturity sound an awful lot like deficiencies related to deterrence. Lots of people of all ages are unduly influenced by their peers, lack appropriate foresight, or engage in risky behavior. Indeed, most of the corrections populations probably fit these criteria.
But proportionality is all about desert.
And that's the rub. If it's true that juveniles are inherently unable to follow the precepts of the law because they lack capacities which make them less amenable to deterrence, then that's an argument in favor of increasing the severity of penal sanctions. But if the discussion is about what juveniles deserve, then it's entirely legitimate for the law to lean on a juvenile's cognitive capacity - those abilities which, after all, permit logical reasoning about moral, social, and interpersonal matters when it sets the bar for culpability and punishment determinations.
But as the authors of a companion article (which is highly critical of the lead piece) suggest, juvenile maturity is highly individualized and culturally dependent. Such observations, of course, do not lend themselves to practical claims about science which can greatly influence legal precedent. And that is what it's all about.
But what is psychosocial maturity? The authors suggest that it is a constellation of capacities which surround risk perception, sensation seeking, impulsivity, peer influence, and future orientation. They further suggest that these abilities are necessary for legitimate proportionality of punishment - that punishment must be commensurate with culpability. Yet these deficits in maturity sound an awful lot like deficiencies related to deterrence. Lots of people of all ages are unduly influenced by their peers, lack appropriate foresight, or engage in risky behavior. Indeed, most of the corrections populations probably fit these criteria.
But proportionality is all about desert.
And that's the rub. If it's true that juveniles are inherently unable to follow the precepts of the law because they lack capacities which make them less amenable to deterrence, then that's an argument in favor of increasing the severity of penal sanctions. But if the discussion is about what juveniles deserve, then it's entirely legitimate for the law to lean on a juvenile's cognitive capacity - those abilities which, after all, permit logical reasoning about moral, social, and interpersonal matters when it sets the bar for culpability and punishment determinations.
But as the authors of a companion article (which is highly critical of the lead piece) suggest, juvenile maturity is highly individualized and culturally dependent. Such observations, of course, do not lend themselves to practical claims about science which can greatly influence legal precedent. And that is what it's all about.
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