People’s justice for everyone

Both William Dean Howells and Edward Bellamy imagine brotherhood as the basis for new social orders in response to the trauma of the Civil War. Responding to the way in which the Civil War had pitted “brother against brother” in a “house divided,” Howells and Bellamy differently seek to reconstitute the American national family through revisioning brotherhood as universal, just, and equitable. William Dean Howells’s 1890 Howells WD (1890) A hazard of new fortunes New York Signet Classics 1965  [Google Scholar] A Hazard of New Fortunes illustrates the difficulties of aligning men in brotherhood following the Civil War and amidst the economic upheaval of the last decades of the 19th century. Bellamy’s 1888 Bellamy E (1888) Looking Backward, 2000‐1887 (Cecilia Tichi, Ed.) New York Penguin Books 1985  [Google Scholar] Looking Backward and Howells’s Altrurian romances (A Traveller from Altruria [1894 Howells WD (1894) A traveler from Altruria In E. J. Cady, R. Gottesman, &; Da. J. Nordloh (Eds.), The Altrurian romances (pp. 5–179) Bloomington Indiana University Press 1968  [Google Scholar]], “Letters of an Altrurian Traveller, I‐V” [1893 Howells WD (1893‐1894) Letters of an Altrurian traveller, I‐V In Edwin J. Cady, Ronald Gottesman, and David J. Nordloh (Eds.) The Altrurian romances (pp. 181–263) Bloomington Indiana University Press 1968  [Google Scholar]‐94] and Through the Eye of the Needle [1907 Howells WD (1907) Through the eye of the needle. 1907 In Edwin J. Cady, Ronald Gottesman, and David J. Nordloh (Eds.), The Altrurian romances (pp. 265–442) Bloomington Indiana University Press 1968  [Google Scholar]]) demonstrate brotherhood’s importance to new visions of community. Brotherhood’s promise for remaking the nation gives rise to the Nationalist movement, which emerged to make real Bellamy’s vision of the future. Brotherhood is a powerful organizing principle for utopian endeavor in post‐Civil War America, despite the limitations coincident with brotherhood, such as the difficulty of imagining brotherhood across race and gender lines.     

Balancing justice goals: restorative justice practitioners’ views

Despite the importance of facilitators, staff, and volunteers to restorative justice programs, we know very little about what they think about the goals of restorative justice. This paper fills that gap by reporting the findings of a survey of restorative justice practitioners in Nova Scotia, Canada. Participants rated the importance of 29 justice-related goals such as punishment and accountability. The results show how respondents distinguish between, prioritize, and balance competing justice goals. A factor analysis shows how goals cluster together revealing more depth about how practitioners understand goals, such as accountability, that have different meanings depending on the context. The findings are particularly interesting because the restorative justice program in Nova Scotia is deeply embedded in the criminal justice system. The findings speak to concerns about whether programs rooted in the mainstream system risk being diluted by dominant criminal justice system discourses. I conclude that restorative justice practitioners can prioritize the values of restorative justice in a program that is deeply rooted in the mainstream criminal justice system.     

Youth restorative justice conferencing: facilitator’s language – help or hindrance?

Youth crime is an ongoing concern in Australia. Victims, offenders and the community are all affected by crime and the current criminal justice approach seems both ineffective and inefficient. Restorative justice proponents have posited that their approach to justice through dialogue and negotiation in the conferencing process may be more effective than the traditional retributive justice. Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is not, however, unfaultable in its ability to reduce the harm caused by crime or to reduce recidivism. The main focus of conferencing has been on the outcomes with limited attention paid to the process and its impact on a young offender’s sense of wrongdoing and remorse. There has been limited research undertaken into the oral competencies of young offenders in relation to their performance in conferencing, and equally limited studies on the specific use of language by facilitators. Other research has shown a coexistence of youth offending and developmental language and learning disabilities. The secondary study discussed in this paper reveals the language difficulties encountered by young offenders in the conferencing process. It is recommended that in order for young offenders to understand what they have been asked, to reflect on it, to express their thoughts and feelings, and for behavioural change to occur, the communication, both verbal and non-verbal, must be unambiguous, comprehensible and pitched at their individual demographic. More research is required into language use by conference facilitators and its impact on young offenders.     

‘It’s a dead place’: A qualitative exploration of violence survivors’ perceptions of justice architecture

Each year, thousands of victims of violence enter the Canadian criminal justice system and, by extension, justice buildings, such as police stations and courthouses. The architecture and design of these buildings communicate symbolic messages about justice and may influence the emotions, behaviors, and well-being of survivors. This qualitative study explored survivors’ emotional experiences with justice architecture. Findings reveal that survivors experience justice architecture as cold and hard; a facilitator of feelings of insignificance; lacking in privacy and; representative of their raw emotional state. The author discusses implications of these findings for victim engagement in the context of justice spaces.     

Disproportionate minority contact in juvenile justice: today’s,and yesterdays,problems

Disproportionate minority contact (DMC) has been a perplexing problem for the juvenile justice system, and recognized as a national priority since the 1980s. The over-representation of minority youthful offenders throughout juvenile court processing, from arrests to dispositions, has not changed even though significant federal and state efforts have been employed. This paper reviews these racial and ethnic disparity problems, and investigates the history of the juvenile justice system and courts, from the eighteenth century to today’s reformation movement, identifying that DMC is not a recent phenomenon. The history of slavery and the Jim Crow Era greatly impacted the establishment of the juvenile courts and child-centered justice efforts, finding disparities at all historical markers where records are available. When reviewing DMC as we know it today through this context, an argument can be made that limited progress has been made over the past 200 years.     

Udder justice: the dairy cow’s experience of milk production regulations in Canada

Abstract

In a world continually (re)structured through neoliberal organization, processes of food production and consumption are increasingly market-oriented within an agribusiness-structured system. This paper provides an exploratory analysis of the role of the Canadian dairy cow as both a producer and a consumer through questioning how the production–consumption roles are structured within federal legal regulations governing the dairy cow’s life on a modern farm. Particularly, this paper explores whether there is a difference between how the dairy cow is defined and treated through regulations governing consumption, such as feed and care, versus production laws, including impregnation and milking processes. This inquiry will be answered by examining literature and data describing Canadian dairy farms, combined with a discourse analysis of federal regulations governing the consumption and production activities of dairy cattle. The results will be presented from the perspective of the Canadian dairy cow, followed by a discussion of how regulations may best represent the just treatment of the dairy cow within both roles.     

A feminist analysis of the American criminal justice system’s response to human trafficking

While criminological and criminal justice scholars have made important contributions to human trafficking literature, to date, such scholarship has been devoid of a feminist analysis of the topic as scholars have spent little time reflecting on how patriarchy impacts the criminal justice system’s response to human trafficking. Such examination is necessary to understand how the issue of patriarchy impacts criminal justice system approaches to the crime as well as the outcomes of such anti-human trafficking efforts. It is argued the influence of patriarchy on criminal justice system policy development and practice undermines the system’s anti-human trafficking efforts.     

On field mice,butterflies, and tigers: Mark Twain’s ‘Ten Commandments’ and circumstance-based justice

The first reports that the Obama administration had deported a record number of people came as a surprise to many. As both Presidents Obama and Bush have attempted to pass moderate immigration reform laws that allowed for legalization, we must ask from where the impetus for driving up the deportation rate has come. The explanation leads to the passage of Secure Communities in 2008, which allowed state and local law enforcement to identify undocumented immigrants through federal information sharing. I seek to explain the social dynamics behind the passage of Secure Communities starting with a review of previous cycles of rapid deportation in US history. I then examine the political activities of the contemporary immigrant restrictionist movement for an understanding of their role.     

Perceived fairness of drug-testing policies: An application of Leventhal’s principles of procedural justice

Employees rate the fairness of organizational policies by applying principles of distributive and procedural justice. Using Leventhal’s (1980) Principles of Procedural Justice, the current study surveyed 279 upper-level college and graduate students to determine the impact each principle has on support for drugtesting policies. The results support the hypothesis that drug-testing programs that violate these principles are viewed as unfair.     

Elusive justice: tribal police officers’ perception of justice in an American Indian community

This paper explores justice-related perceptions among tribal police officers providing service within a southeastern Indian Reservation in the United States. Interviews with 27 tribal police officers were conducted to understand the manner of the administration of tribal justice. Almost half of the participants interviewed felt that their tribal justice system was dysfunctional due to inter-tribal politics, federal government restrictions, and lenient tribal judges. Additionally, tribal police officers also described the failure of the federal government in prosecuting felony crimes on the reservation. As a result, they believed that both the tribal and federal criminal justice systems did not adequately address crime on the reservation.     

Victims’ motivations for reporting to the ‘fraud justice network’

ABSTRACT

It is well-established that (online) fraud has one of the lowest reporting rates across all crime categories. However, there is a large gap examining why some victims choose to report online fraud offenses. Therefore, this paper examines the under-researched group of online fraud victims who reported their crimes to authorities. Based on interviews with 80 victims across Australia, who lost at least AUD10,000 to online fraud, this paper demonstrates two motivations behind reporting: a sense of individual justice, and an altruistic notion of protecting others. The paper also highlights the negativity associated with the reporting process. The paper uses these findings to determine what can be learnt from the victims who were willing to report. It concludes with a discussion of the challenges evident in seeking to improve the confidence of victims reporting to authorities.     

Coase’s world and Coase’s blackboard

In this contribution I focus on a particular characteristic of Ronald Coase’s work, as exhibited in “The Problem of Social Cost”: his ability to force upon his audience a clearer grasp of reality than they previously held. More specifically, I aim to consider to what extent the “blackboard economics” that Coase himself derided have been avoided in a Coasean world, taking that expression to refer in some sense to a world where Coasean insights can flourish, and as such to be a world not simply of Coase’s own making but a world that has been developed by others in applying the Coase Theorem. My strategy is to interrogate the nature of a Coasean world through developing a framework that can look more closely at different approaches to theoretical modelling, the different worlds involved in these models, and the different positive and normative applications that can be derived from them. I shall further consider whether the understanding of the law that inhabits a Coasean world reflects a “real-world” legal environment. Finally, I shall seek to assess the impact of Coase’s work on our understanding of the relationship between law and economics, in our world.     

Towards a global ‘child friendly’ juvenile justice?

The impact of globalisation on juvenile justice is increasingly conceptualised with reference to neo-liberal governance and the intensification of ‘new punitiveness’. Whatever the merits of such analyses, they have the effect of marginalising, if not completely overlooking, the extent to which international human rights instruments might serve to neutralise and/or mediate punitive currents. Indeed, it might be argued that the commitment – repeatedly expressed in official discourse – to both protect and promote the human rights of children in conflict with the law has itself come to comprise a discursive and tangible dimension of global child governance. Key signifiers of this phenomenon – at the global level – include a corpus of interrelated human rights conventions, standards, treaties and rules, formally adopted by the United Nations General Assembly, whilst at the European level authoritative rights-informed guidelines on ‘child friendly justice’, ratified by the Council of Europe, are similarly representative. Against this backdrop, this article seeks to investigate the degree to which individual nation states receive and respond to their human rights and ‘child friendly justice’ obligations. Whilst recognising the mediating capacities of formal human rights instruments, we aim to critically interrogate the relations between globalised rhetoric and localised reality; between the promise of international rights discourse on the one hand and the limitations of territorial jurisdictional implementation on the other.     

Can restorative justice disrupt the ‘school-to-prison pipeline?’

The ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ now commonly refers to the impact of zero tolerance and other harsh exclusionary discipline policies on school suspensions and expulsions, especially felt among minority students of color in the United States. Abundant evidence now concludes that such students are suspended, expelled, disciplinarily referred and arrested at rates far exceeding either their representation in the population or that of their white peers. Restorative justice practices have emerged as an increasingly popular response to racial disparity in school discipline, supported by research, state and federal governmental initiatives. However, the capacity of restorative justice to limit the school-to-prison pipeline may remain unfulfilled unless it can disrupt current social-organizational structures that maintain racial inequity in institutional structures. This paper considers the effectiveness of restorative justice in schools as an alternative to overly punitive discipline policy and as a strategy for reducing racial disciplinary disparity. It then considers organizational and cultural impediments to implementing restorative justice to overcome racial disciplinary inequity for school-based youth and asserts that restorative justice must strive for more than incremental change inside existing systems.     

Editor’s note

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, a small movement endorsing the use of animal abuse registries (AARs) has emerged in the United States. Today, one state, 16 counties, and the City of New York have adopted AAR legislation, and 28 other states have attempted to pass such legislation. Here, we discuss similarities between AARs and sexual offender registries in theoretical terms, discuss the nature of AAR legislation, and provide data on the use of AARs, and count the number of offenders listed in those registries at two points in time. We also provide a count of animal abuse, and potential ways that animal abuse might be counted that are not addressed in current AAR legislation. We discuss whether AARs are ‘a good idea,’ especially as a policy response that might be associated with green criminology.