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Despite evidence suggesting proactive responses to youth crime are advantageous, juvenile justice relies heavily on punitive practices. This discrepancy is in part affected by public preferences for retribution, which are skewed by sensationalized media portrayals of youth crime. This experiment (N = 174) explores how youth crime media exposure translates into retributive attitudes by testing the hypothesis that media portrayals of school shootings increase retributive attitudes indirectly through either dehumanization or mortality salience. Statistical analyses suggest that dehumanization mediates the relationship between school-shooting media portrayals and retributive attitudes toward crime-involved youths. To promote support of less retributive juvenile justice policies, advocates may benefit by focusing emphasis on humanizing elements of young offenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article overview the history of rehabilitation and punishment in the American criminal justice systems; discusses social, psychological and legal considerations that led to rehabilitation in juvenile and adult criminal justice; and reports the rehabilitation laws.

Early attribution research suggests that those who view criminal acts as highly internal, controllable, and stable tend to support more severe and retributive punishment. This study aims to further examine how laypeople's attributions for crime relate to their perceptions of responsibility, emotions, punishment goals, and prison reform attitudes. Participants completed surveys with one of five criminal conviction scenarios. Correlational analyses and a path model provided support for links between internal and controllable attributions, high levels of anger and blame, retributive punishment purposes, and judgments against reform funding. Those with higher prison system knowledge and the politically liberal agreed more that prison system change is necessary. The potential use of these data for prison reform activists is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]