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CRIMINAL JUSTICE

CRIMINAL JUSTICE-CRIMINAL LAW-PROCDEDURE-SENTENCING-COURTS

Posts tagged survey
Children’s Knowledge and Opinion of Sentencing

By Kathryn Hollingsworth, Jonathan Bild and Gavin Dingwall

This report describes the findings from a survey of 1,038 children living in England and Wales aged between 10-17 years, drawn from the general public and conducted in 2023. The research contributes to the literature on the public’s knowledge and opinion of sentencing and this survey follows up an earlier report by the Sentencing Academy, published in January 2022, which explored public knowledge of sentencing practice and trends through a survey of adult respondents. This report, however, focuses on a cohort – children over the minimum age of criminal responsibility – who are largely absent from the existing research literature.

Key Findings

  • Most children reported having spoken to someone about what happens in a criminal court. The most common answer (57%) was that they had spoken to ‘my family’, with 39% of respondents having spoken to ‘my teacher at school’. However, very few respondents (2%) reported having been to a criminal court.

  • Respondents reported having seen what happens in a criminal court from a variety of sources, with the two most common responses being ‘on a TV programme’ and ‘in a film’.

  • Despite all participants in the survey having reached the minimum age of criminal responsibility, respondents generally over-estimated the age at which children become criminally responsible: 61% of those who provided an answer to the question of at what age does a child become criminally responsible (i.e. excluding those who answered ‘don’t know’) thought it was over the correct age of 10-years-old.

  • The children in this survey were much less likely than adult respondents to think that the sentencing of adults is too lenient: 27% of respondents thought that sentencing was too lenient but a greater proportion – 34% – thought it was ‘about right’. Only 16% of respondents thought that the sentencing of children was too lenient.

  • Whilst the vast majority (81%) of respondents correctly identified that a judge ‘would’ sentence a 25-year-old more severely than a 15-year-old for an identical offence, only 50% of respondents thought that they ‘should’ do so; 38% thought that both offenders should receive the same punishment.

  • Respondents generally under-estimated the severity of sentencing for children convicted of a repeat knife offence. In a scenario crafted to engage a mandatory custodial sentence as the most likely outcome, 57% of respondents thought that the offending would most likely be met with a non-custodial sentence. This included a majority of 16- and 17-year old respondents to whom the mandatory sentencing provisions apply

London: Sentencing Academy, 2024. 26p.

Protected & Served? 2022 Community Survey of LGBTQ+ People and People Living with HIV's Experiences with the Criminal Legal System

By Somjen Frazer, Richard Saenz, Andrew Aleman, and Laura Laderman

OUR VOICE IS OUR POWER: In 2022, Lambda Legal, in partnership with Black and Pink National, launched the Protected and Served? community survey. With this project, we aimed to learn more about the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) people and people living with HIV with the criminal legal system, to assess these communities’ levels of trust in government institutions, and to create a new resource for community members, advocates, policymakers, and researchers for LGBTQ+ and HIV liberation.

This report describes the findings of Protected and Served?. In addition to asking structured questions that provide a quantitative (numerical) account of the participants’ experiences, the survey also asked for qualitative data (open-ended questions); these answers were analyzed systematically, and the qualitative findings are included throughout the report.1 Protected and Served? focuses on the widespread harm caused to LGBTQ+ people and people living with HIV by the criminal legal system, including the adult carceral system, immigration system, juvenile systems, the courts, and schools. The report also examines intersectional disparities within these impacted groups of people.

Lambda Delta, 2022. 82p.