A 10-Year-Old's Insight into the Criminal Justice System

“The purpose of college is to learn information which challenges your world view, helps you grow as a learner and person.”

This quote spoke to me and the way I perceive college and education as a whole. But for this, I decided to turn and look the other way. I wanted to gain a view into what sort of views are first cultivated by media consumption. I decided to interview my girlfriend’s ten-year-old sister, Janelle.

Janelle is the closest thing to a normal ten-year-old as one could get. She uses TikTok, doesn’t really follow traditional news media, and likes to perform wrestling moves on pillows she finds around the house. Unsurprisingly, she is not very articulate. Despite this, she is still able to get her message across. Janelle stumbles through her thoughts and emotions, a clear indication that she’s still a budding young mind searching for her true voice. I am curious to learn about how she views the world. What does she think of the police? How does she perceive crime and the criminal justice system? What are her opinions?

I sat down with her for an interview that she hesitantly agreed to. Her hesitance was not out of mistrust or caution, but confusion. Her reaction to my asking her for an interview showed me that not many people ask her about what she thinks about things, or what her world is like.

I start off by asking her if she watches or has ever seen any crime TV shows like Law and Order or NCIS. In so many rambling words, she tells me no. The look in her eyes tell me that she’s trying to figure out what answer I’m looking for out of her. Over the course of the interview, this search for the “correct” answer fades away, and I am finally able to understand how a young mind is affected by media and crime in popular media.

The next question I ask her is what type of crime she thinks is most common.

“Um, I think I’d have to go with, I think people mostly rob. I’m not sure.”

Interestingly, she is right in a roundabout way. I let her know, and this seems to calm her nerves about finding the right answer to my questions. “You’re pretty much right on. Property crime, which is when somebody’s belongings are stolen or destroyed without anybody getting hurt. You know, people don’t really get hurt as often as you may think.” To this, Janelle nods her head and looks off into the distance. Silent gears turn in her head.

I don’t bother asking her what sort of news she consumes, as she is ten years old. Instead, I ask her about her social media usage. I know the answer before I ask the question, but I want to hear her say it. She confirms that she only uses TikTok.

“Do you ever see anything about crime on TikTok?” I attempt to connect my questions to current events. “Like with George Floyd and the cop that killed him, did you see that on social media at all?”

“Yeah, a lot of it, um, not gonna lie was everywhere on the app technically.” Her answers are packed with fluffy interjections like “um,” or “not gonna lie,” but her message cuts through the marshmallow diction. I ask her what she thinks about George Floyd and Derek Chauvin. “I think it was really messed up how the cop would do that just because of his skin color, and I think it’s just really dumb and a waste of time, but I felt really bad for the guy.” Her thoughts are (pun not intended) skin-deep. But that is okay, because again, she’s only ten. She also expresses that she supports Black Lives Matter and that she does not support people who speak against BLM on TikTok.

My next question is one of the more telling ones. “What is fake news?”

She tap dances through an answer, but eventually makes it clear that “fake news” is a term she has never heard before. As far as she can guess, it is when “people [make] things up about a crime or something like that.” I am fascinated by the fact that she is unfamiliar with this term. My question to her is the first time she’s ever heard the phrase (and this kind of blows my mind, as the phrase has been burned into my brain over the past four years). Her answer shows that children are unaware that the media they consume is not always truthful, and sometimes is intentionally misleading. I guess this makes sense in hindsight; children are not the most perceptive consumers of media. It is not a stretch to imagine children born today and onward will be taught by their parents to not always trust what they see on TV or the internet in the same way that my parents taught me not to give out my real name on the internet. A level of healthy distrust of others in the vein of “don’t talk to strangers” must be instilled in the youth of today in order to move society toward a higher standard of media consumption. Some lessons are generational, and I hope that future generations will be taught about fake news and how to navigate media consumption in similar ways that I was taught how to use the internet. Kids these days (forgive my old man-speak) don’t need anyone to teach them how to use the internet, they’ve been doing it for as long as they can remember. But what they do need is for someone to teach them how to responsibly receive information from the media.

Next, I ask Janelle how she thinks crime is dealt with in society. “What happens when the police catch a criminal?”

“Uh, mostly they either want to make sure, they ask them, not all of them, but a few people ask questions or they can go around the place and see if there's any DNA or they can just go to jail. I’m pretty sure.”

This answer piques my interest. Although I don’t know how often the police collect DNA from crime scenes, Janelle’s mentioning of it makes me think that she is a victim of the CSI- Effect. Through first-order cultivation (and also childhood naivete), Janelle believes that DNA testing is one of the main responsibilities of the police when it comes to dealing with crime. You might want to chalk this answer up to her being a kid who just doesn’t really understand how the world works, but she must have somehow heard about DNA testing often enough for it to stick in her memory. Cultivation theory is very much alive in the minds of children.

I then ask her what she thinks should be done to criminals when they’re caught. This question was a little too much for her, but something in her answer sticks out to me. She says that putting people in jail seems to work, even though she understands that a criminal might just be “going through some stuff,” and that jail might not always be the answer. This piece of wisdom from ten-year-old Janelle set off alarms in my head. I ask her what she means by “going through some stuff.”

“Maybe something happened in their childhood or something happened that’s making them feel anger or maybe they’re just feeling that there’s something they didn’t get as a child.” While vague, her answer shows the beginning of an understanding about personal motivations for crime. I expected her to give me an answer that leaned closer to “some stuff” referring to a person’s financial or social context (for example, “some stuff” could refer to a person having a hard time finding a job, so they result to crime to pay the bills), but what she meant was that a person’s motivations for crime might be a result of childhood experience. A person may not have gotten the unconditional love that a child deserves, so they grew up into a person who wanted to prevent others from feeling the love they never received. I know I’m extrapolating on her words a bit, but I’m doing so only because when I asked her for more, she told me that she couldn’t really put her thoughts into words. Her problem with a lack of vocabulary is one I can relate to, especially when studying communications. Her message conveys an undertone of classical criminology, where one believes that a criminal is a rational actor who explicitly makes the decision to commit crime while understanding the consequences. Before I ask her the question I really want to, I toss her a softball question. “Why do people commit crimes?”

“If they’re not going through something … I think that they’re either not thinking straight or that they don’t mean to, or maybe some people do, but not all of them. I'm not sure.”

“Do you think that most criminals understand the consequences when they get caught? Or do you think people don’t understand the consequences but do it anyway?”

“Half and half. Some people do, some people don’t.”

Well put.

Janelle and I learned a lot during our interview. I did my best to answer any questions she had, one of them about why police mistreat and beat up on criminals. It’s a tough question, but I offer her the answer she gave me earlier. Maybe those police officers were mistreated as kids and decided to take out these old grudges on others now that they have the power to. A kid who got bullied might grow up into a police officer who wants to bully others because they were always on the receiving end. It’s not a complete answer, of course, but it was my best attempt to translate the complexities of police brutality into words that a ten year old can understand.

I learned that the media is able to sway the perceptions of everyone, regardless of how young they might be. While they might not understand the greater societal contexts behind the words they hear, there are certainly little nuggets that stick and get carried throughout the entirety of a person’s life. Because of that, we need to be vigilant in educating our children on how to consume information and media responsibly as early as we can.