NCJ Number
86674
Journal
Scottish Journal of Sociology Volume: 4 Issue: 2 Dated: (May 1980) Pages: 193-211
Date Published
1980
Length
19 pages
Annotation
Although Scotland's 1968 Social Work Act emphasizes a diagnostic and treatment approach for juvenile delinquents, the implementation of this approach is left to panels of laypersons, whose orientations are rooted in the concepts of moral responsibility, guilt, and just punishment.
Abstract
How individuals act in and on the world is determined in part by the structuring properties of their language. The world, particularly the social world, is not objectively knowable, but can only be appreciated through a conceptual framework which facilitates persons making sense of or ordering the world. Over the years, Calvinist theology has formed the concepts and language for interpreting the moral and social world of most of Scotland's population. Calvinist theology holds that an individual is an autonomous, morally responsible being expected to incur guilt and punishment as a consequence of wrongdoing. Scotland's 1968 Social Work Act uses the medical analogy as the theoretical basis for a system that deals with juveniles 'in need of compulsory measures of care.' The punitive orientation is deemphasized in favor of the diagnosis and treatment of need. Yet despite the predominance of the technical jargon of the therapeutic rhetoric, those granted ultimate responsibility for making decisions about juveniles in need are not social workers and psychiatrists schooled and conditioned by the medical model but lay members of the community acting in hearings. These laypersons can be expected to operate from a Calvinist perspective rather than that of the medical model, thus inevitably producing a conflict between the intent and the implementation of the legislation. Thirty-nine references are listed.