Young people are entitled to the same legal rights as adults. However past research has questioned the extent to which youth effectively understand their rights and perceive that they can assert them when necessary because of their development and power differences vis-à-vis adult criminal justice professionals. Young people’s understanding of their due process rights under theCanadian Charter of Rights and FreedomsandUnited Nations Convention on the Rights of the Childwere examined. Participants were fifty adolescents ranging in age from 13-17 who received a diversionary response by the Crown prosecutor or were sentenced by the court to probation in a courthouse in Toronto, Ontario. Results of semi-structured interviews conducted with youth indicated that while age plays some role, the lack of power experienced by youth vis-à-vis criminal justice professionals has the most bearing on the inability of youth to exercise their rights. Implications of the study are discussed.

Extrajudicial measures under the Youth Criminal Justice Act require police to reorient their thinking about how to respond to youth. The act provides specific structure and guidance to police about the appropriateness of extrajudicial measures and does not preclude its use when a youth received one in the past. The emphasis on accountability and proportionality suggests that police ought to be driven by the seriousness of the youth's offending behaviour and much less by the youth's record. Drawing from a sample of 70 police officers from five jurisdictions within Ontario, our surveys (N = 70) and in-depth interviews (N = 64) with police reveal that they place relatively heavy weight on prior police contact of any kind (past extrajudicial measure or finding of guilt) and that this has a significant influence on their attitudes towards diverting youth for minor offences like mischief and shoplifting. The results are analyzed within the context of literature on police attitudes and decision making to divert in Canada.

Authors have pointed to multiple dimensions of crime and punishment, and in particular, the need to understand both the roles of instrumental and expressive elements. The latter dimension -the expressive or symbolic purpose of punishment -has been viewed as a specific reason for the relatively low success rate of decreasing the use of imprisonment, particularly with respect to public acceptability. I argue that in addition, there has not been adequate attention paid to the roles of factors such as the nature of the offence and the age of the offender. The purpose of this article is to offer a lens through which to think about penal equivalents, and the nuances of various connections among multiple dimensions of punishment. What is lacking from criminal justice literature and legislation is a broader framework for understanding the relationship among purposes of sentencing, sanctions, offences and offenders -how a specific sanction is seen as accomplishing specific purposes only with respect to certain offences and offenders. The present analysis draws on a random sample of residents in Ontario, Canada about their views of the acceptability of fines and community service orders as penal substitutes for custodial sentences across different offence and offender scenarios.

Three decades of research on public perceptions in Canada has fundamentally shifted academic and policy approaches to understanding public views of crime and punishment. The contributions of Anthony Doob and his colleagues have influenced methodology, such as the inclusion of experimental design, and have supported an underlying commitment to understanding the public's view of crime and its relationship to policy. This article examines key findings coming out of this body of research and the impact of this work on current criminal justice policy in Canada. Despite the significance of this body of work on public perceptions research, the impact on current criminal justice policy appears to be diminishing.

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