Controlling young people through treatment and punishment

This chapter focuses on how the Danish welfare state seeks to control offending young people through both treatment and punishment. Seeking to control young people is nothing new, and older generations have always worried that younger generations would fail to become responsible adults like themselves. What is relatively new in a Danish context is that the worrying about the young has expanded into different public areas so that we now see diverse polices directed at both protecting and punishing the young, for example, protection from alcohol and tobacco, punishment by cutting their welfare benefits, and encouraging them to finish their education faster. On one hand, efforts are made to control undesired risk behavior related to health (such as smoking and drinking) and education through the implementation of general campaigns directed at young people to encourage self-governance. On the other hand, more serious risk behavior (crime) is directly controlled through interventions containing treatment and/or punishment. This chapter will analyze the balancing of treatment and punishment in controlling serious risk behavior among young people (for detailed discussions about health and alcohol use, see chapters 9 and 10). Although few young people are deprived of their liberty in Danish society, there has been a significant increase in numbers resulting partly from increased political focus on youth crime.