Juvenile court intake decision making: The importance of family affiliation

Based on an analysis of official records and systematic observations of intake hearings, this study empirically evaluates the criteria employed in determining whether a juvenile is petitioned to court for a formal hearing and if petitioned, whether he or she is held in preadjudicatory detention. Attention is paid to legal, social, demeanor-related, and demographic variables as they impinge on intake decision making. The major finding of this study is that the farther one goes into the intake decision-making process, the more does family disaffiliation become the prominent independent variable. The article places this area of research within relevant criminological paradigms (positivist, interactionist, neo- Marxist), summarizes the existing empirical findings, and integrates theory and evidence with the goal of producing a statement on this screening stage in the juvenile justice endeavor.     

Introduction: disability,partnership, and family across time and space

ABSTRACT

Notions of family life and romantic partnership, like notions of disability, have been culturally constructed and socially produced over historical time, and our understandings of these notions are being continually challenged and re-negotiated across time and space. Policies, institutions, and cultural practices across the globe have brought about changes to the construction of the family and to the rights and inclusion of disabled people in private and public life. This special issue brings together a collection of studies from different countries and time periods to explore the interplay between disability, romantic partnerships, and family life across the individual lifetime and between generations. With this interdisciplinary collection, we seek to merge disability research and research on family and partnerships through a life course lens. This offers unique insights and opportunities to interconnect historical and cultural location and changing social institutions with individual and family experiences. This introduction presents the eight studies in the collection and discusses them within a life course frame that views disabled people’s roles as partners, spouses, and members of a family. In so doing, it engages in an analysis of (dis)similarities concerning how family dynamics, romantic relationships, and disability have developed over time and in different spaces.     

Introduction: Household and family contexts in the Balkans

The structural study of the Balkan family began in the United States in the 1940s, producing several generations of scholars. Such scholarly continuity is much more recent on the European continent. Findings to date suggest the Balkan pattern of male equal partible inheritance could lead to four distinctive household formation patterns. But though it seems that the inheritance system played a key role, it was only in combination with additional elements that a distinctive pattern evolved. These additional elements were neolocality or patrivirilocality; environmental factors (abundance or scarcity of land, remote mountainous regions, islands); economic factors such as forms of pastoralism, mixed production or fishing; and agnatic kinship as opposed to community ties. Future research will have to continue to address the question of Balkan familial diversity, as well as how the Balkans compare to the rest of Europe with respect to crucial familial characteristics.     

Introduction: Household and family contexts in the Balkans

The structural study of the Balkan family began in the United States in the 1940s, producing several generations of scholars. Such scholarly continuity is much more recent on the European continent. Findings to date suggest the Balkan pattern of male equal partible inheritance could lead to four distinctive household formation patterns. But though it seems that the inheritance system played a key role, it was only in combination with additional elements that a distinctive pattern evolved. These additional elements were neolocality or patrivirilocality; environmental factors (abundance or scarcity of land, remote mountainous regions, islands); economic factors such as forms of pastoralism, mixed production or fishing; and agnatic kinship as opposed to community ties. Future research will have to continue to address the question of Balkan familial diversity, as well as how the Balkans compare to the rest of Europe with respect to crucial familial characteristics.     

The dynamic of family structures in seventeenth-century Moldavia. Adoption and godparenthood

This study analyzes aspects related to family structure and kinship (in particularly, to relations between parents and children, but other types than the blood relations) and the influences they had on seventeenth-century Moldavian society. In the first part, the focus is on the practice of adoption that is mainly mentioned in documents through the expression taking into one's soul and has as its main purpose ensuring posterity and implicitly transmitting patrimony. This analysis is based on juridical disposition and diverse types of documents conserved referring to this practice, trying to outline the importance of this gesture in Early Modern Moldavian society and the nature of the reasons which caused the individual to choose this lineage manner. Also, for a better understanding of the role and the amount of the patrimony inherited by the adopted children in the destiny of a family and its social implications, the method of comparing the adoption in contrast with other spiritual kinships, especially with baptismal sponsorship, has been used.     

Generality, continuity, and change in offending

A number of criminological theories make either implicit or explicit predictions about the empirical relationship between prior and future offending behavior. Some argue that time-stable characteristics such as criminal propensity should account for any positive correlation between past and future criminal behavior for all individuals. Others contend that the positive association between offending behavior at different points in time are partly causal and partly spurious. Still others anticipate that different patterns will emerge for different groups (distinguished by their ciminal propensity) of individuals. Using a longitudinal data set comprised of 848 training school releasees, we test various hypotheses emanating from these different theoretical perspectives. The results indicate that (1) both stability and change have causal implications for one's offending behavior and (2) with but one exception, these effects do not vary between high and low criminal propensity groups.     

Making and Breaking Family Life: Adoption, the State, and Human Rights

This article explores the extent to which the state's duties and responsibilities in the context of adoption are framed and reinforced by a rights-based discourse. It argues that the human rights paradigm plays an invaluable role in the pre-adoption process by identifying and imposing ever more exacting obligations on the state - obligations which are currently not being fully met by the Adoption and Children Act 2002. The application of a rights-based discourse to the post-adoption context proves, however, to be considerably more problematic. Indeed, it is argued that rather than extend and strengthen the state's responsibilities towards the child and the adopted family, liberal rights-based doctrine tends towards a more traditional model of adoption in which a minimalist state and the privacy, autonomy, and self-sufficiency of the new adoptive family are further entrenched. It is thus concluded that a human rights analysis provides no secure basis for challenging the Adoption and Children Act's rather limited provisions on post-adoption support.     

Sexual Orientation,Gender Identity,and Adoption Law

The legal landscape surrounding adoption by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning/queer (LGBTQ) parents continues to be dynamic and variable across the United States, yet the topic is generally viewed favorably by Americans and increasing numbers of LGBTQ adults are becoming adoptive parents. In this essay, we explore intersections of sexual orientation, gender identity, and adoption law. We discuss connections between parenting (including adoption) and marriage rights, highlight the influence of varying legal contexts and discrimination for LGBTQ adults who pursue adoption (including case examples from Florida after the gay adoption ban was lifted), and incorporating the perspectives of adoption‐agency personnel working with LGBTQ clients.     

Reform, change, and continuity in Finnish health care

This article describes some essential aspects of the Finnish political and governmental system and the evolution of the basic institutional elements of the health care system. We examine the developments that gave rise to a series of health care reforms and reform proposals in the late 1980s and early 1990s and relate them to changes in health care expenditure, structure, and performance. Finally, we discuss the relationship between policy changes, reforms, and health system changes and the strength of neo-institutional theory in explaining both continuity and change. Much of the change in Finnish health care can be explained by institutional path dependency. The tradition of strong but small local authorities and the lack of legitimate democratic regional authorities as well as the coexistence of a dominant Beveridge-style health system with a marginal Bismarckian element explain the specific path of Finnish health care reform. Public responsibility for health care has been decentralized to smaller local authorities (known as municipalities) more than in any other country. Even an exceptionally deep economic recession in the early 1990s did not lead to systems change; rather, the economic imperative was met by the traditional centralized policy pattern. Some of the developments of the 1990s are, however, difficult to explain by institutional theory. Thus, there is a need for testing alternative theories as well.     

Patrilines,surnames, and family identity:

The Imperial decrees emancipating the serfs of the Russian Baltic provinces (1816–1820) included the requirement that serfs, who would now become free peasants and obtain legal standing, have both a first name and a surname, the latter of their own choosing. The article examines the process through which Baltic peasants obtained surnames and analyzes the choices they made. In the Pinkenhof estate, in the province of Livland, emancipated serfs most often chose surnames that reflected their place of residence, but also frequently chose names from the natural world, occupations, and other similar sources. The acquisition of surnames helped to consolidate family and lineage identity, which had been difficult in the pre-emancipation perion when individuals bore only a first name plus the name of the place in which they were currently residing, the latter changing as they moved.     

Gang affiliation,aggression, and violent offending in a sample of youth offenders

Abstract

Gang affiliation, aggression, and violent offending were examined in case files of 390 youth offenders aged between 16 and 18 years. Results indicated that youth offenders who were gang members and those who were not gang members but exposed to friends in gangs had a significantly higher likelihood of violent offending compared with a reference group of youth offenders who had neither gang affiliation nor friends in gangs. Additionally, youth offenders who had friends in gangs but were themselves not gang members had a lower likelihood of violent offending than youth offenders who were gang members. Finally, results showed that a history of aggressive behavior was significantly associated with violent offending. Implications such as the need to address the influence of delinquent peers and need to address the management of anger and aggression in youths will be discussed. Also, findings point towards the need for prevention and early intervention work.     

Truth and Consequences: Law,Myth and Metaphor in American Indian Contested Adoption

This article considers the effects of the operations of myth and metaphor on law through a comparison of a United States Supreme Court decision and a novel that deal with the contested trans-racial adoption of an American Indian child. It argues that the United States founding myth of Manifest Destiny—of the divinely ordained fate of the continent to host a (white) Christian state—is determinative of the way in which legal decisions regarding American Indians are made. The myth of Manifest Destiny contains a metaphor of vanished American Indians, such that contemporary American Indians are rendered nearly invisible and whose existence is not easily absorbed into the working of the American legal system. The American Indian Child Welfare Act provides protections against assimilation for indigenous families and community, thus working at cross-purposes to the ultimate aim of Manifest Destiny. What happens in those instances when legal provisions and interpretation run counter to Manifest Destiny? Through the consideration of the situation of a contested adoption, this article reveals the heavy influence of Manifest Destiny in the Supreme Court decision, which is counter to the vision of a pluralistic culture envisioned in both the novel and the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) itself. The consequences of legal resistance to ICWA for American Indian communities and as to the operation of the legal system itself are discussed.     

Introduction: Structure or strategy? Essays on family, demography, and labor from the Dutch N.W. Posthumus Institute

The concept of ‘family strategies’ has yielded much valuable research when used in the classic ‘quantitative’ and ‘anthropological’ approaches to the history of family life. Its continued use as a research concept requires, however, that significantly more attention be paid to the relationships between families as social units and their individual members, to the great variety of families and households, and to the different motives that guided families in charging strategies. These questions are brought to the forefront when the history of the family is investigated cross-culturally and comparatively, as the articles of this Special Issue, written by researchers of the Dutch N. W. Posthumus Institute, seek to do.     

Adoption and Victorian culture

In 1888, evangelical, educator and feminist Constance Maynard adopted Effie Anthon, a six year old girl from a Salvation Army orphanage. Her mother, Rosabianca Fasulo was an unmarried, Italian woman recently “rescued” by the Salvation Army. Maynard anticipated that Effie would one day join her at her college but she met none of the expectations for her. She entered domestic service but fell ill with tuberculosis and died in a workhouse in 1915. This is one particular case history of an adoption when the practice was not yet formalized but small numbers began to adopt children unknown to them. It tentatively opens up the history of adoption in Victorian Britain. It also illuminates some broader questions about family ties, the meanings associated with motherhood, and how the body and character formation were understood.