This dissertation explores youth punishment in Canada in the social systems of law and education. My research contributes to work in the sociologies of youth, punishment, education, and law, youth justice, and social systems theory. The present study is guided by a concern that there is a need for a meaningful account of youth punishment in social systems. It specifically focuses on three problems in the sociological study of youth punishment: a gloomy state of theorizing; the absence of a more frontally distinct analysis of youth punishment beyond the realm of exclusion; and the underdevelopment of inter-systemic and intra-systemic features of youth punishment. This study confronts these issues with an exploratory qualitative analysis of how punishment operates in the social systems of law and education. The questions guiding this work include: 1) how are youth punished in the systems of law and education, and 2) in the context of youth punishment in social systems, are the social systems of law and education linked, influenced or coupled, and if so, how?My project is different from other scholarship in the field as it relies on insights from Niklas Luhmann's contemporary social systems theory. This theory argues that social systems operate communicationally and the world is made up of functionally differentiated systems. This framework points me to study the legal and educational communications of punishment. This perspective foregrounds the inter-systemic and intra-systemic features of youth punishment in law and education. While many important contributions focus on the effects of punishment (exclusion, harshness, inequality…) and what (over)determines punishment (race, culture, morality, fears, politics…), my work addresses the absence of an empirical and theoretical understanding of youth punishment from the point of view of social systems.My research highlights the peculiarities of punishment in the social systems of law and education, and shows how punishment can connect social systems. I expose how there are distinctly educational and distinctly legal features of youth punishment. First, I present a suite of intra-systemic features of punishment in law. The peculiarities of youth punishment in law are captured with law's focus on offering protection, distinguishing fools from fiends, observing the character and associated consequences of youth behaviour, and pursuing accountability. Second, I show the peculiarities of youth punishment in education by documenting education's focus on the locality of behaviour, school climate, and progressive discipline. Finally, I analyse how education and law are able to influence each other, which means that law can productively make use of education and education can productively make use of law.My study provides the opportunity to be cognizant of the day-to-day workings of legal and educational punishment and the interactions between these two systems. This research shows that more attention could be paid to both the peculiarities of different social systems where pun...
