Legal Aid,Social Workers,and the Redefinition of the Legal Profession in Chile, 1925–1960

This article examines the history of the Chilean Legal Aid Service (Servicio de Asistencia Judicial) from the 1920s until the 1960s. It argues that with the emergence of the “social question”—the concern for improving the lower classes' working and living conditions to promote the nation's modernization and prevent political radicalization—the Chilean legal profession committed to legal aid reform to escape a professional identity crisis. Legal aid allowed lawyers to claim they had a new “social function” advocating on behalf of the poor. However, within legal aid offices, lawyers interacted with female social workers who acted as gatekeepers, mediators, and translators between the lawyers and the poor. This gendered professional complementarity in legal aid offices helped lawyers to put limits on their new “social function”: it allowed them to maintain legal aid as a part‐time activity that did not challenge the structure of the legal system as a whole.     

Certification – An Overview

Delinquents are better managed in the juvenile court, though the adult system may be necessary for the few cases in which juvenile facilities and jurisdictional time remaining cannot adequately protect the public.     

Disaggregating LWOP: Life Without Parole,Capital Punishment,and Mass Incarceration in Florida, 1972–1995

Over the past 40 years, life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) has been transformed from a rare sanction and marginal practice of last resort into a routine punishment in the United States. Two general theses—one depicting LWOP as a direct outgrowth of death penalty abolition; another collapsing LWOP into the tough‐on‐crime sentencing policy of the mass incarceration era—serve as working explanations for this phenomenon. In the absence of in‐depth studies, however, there has been little evidence for carefully evaluating these narratives. This article provides a state‐level historical analytic account of LWOP's rise by looking to Florida—the state that uses LWOP more than any other—to explicate LWOP's specific processes and forms. Recounting LWOP's history in a series of critical junctures, the article identifies a different stimulus, showing how LWOP precipitated as Florida translated major structural upheavals that broke open traditional ways of doing and thinking about punishment. In doing so, the article reveals LWOP to be a multilayered product of incremental change, of many, sometimes disjointed and indirectly conversant, pieces. Presenting LWOP as the product of a variety of penal logics, including those prioritizing fairness and efficiency, the article more generally illustrates how very severe punishments can arise from reforms without primarily punitive purposes and in ways that were not necessarily planned.     

Homicide–suicide in Hong Kong, 1989–1998

This study provides the first systematic research of homicide–suicide (HS) in a Chinese society. Data were drawn from the HK Homicide Monitoring Data-base computer file derived from investigation and death reports held by the HK Police Force and the Coroner’s Court. During the 10-year study period, 56 events involving 133 deaths were identified. The majority of offenders were males (75%) and most victims were female (64%). The mean age of offenders and victims were 41.9 and 32.3 years, respectively. Spouses and lovers comprised the majority of victims (46.4%) followed by child victims (36%). Most HS events were motivated by separation or termination of marital or sexual relations (39%), economic reasons (25%) and other domestic disputes (20%). The most frequent modes of killing were strangulation/suffocation (26%), stabbing/chopping (24%), followed by gassing/poisoning (14%) and falling from a height (14%). The commonest method of suicide was falling from a height (48%). It was followed by gassing/poisoning (22%) and strangulation/suffocation (13%). Depression (18.3%) was found to be the commonest mental disorder. Most offenders were from low-socio-economic background. Two-third were unemployed and 76.6% had 9 or less years of education. HS in HK were distinguished from those reported in the western literature in respect to the high relevance of economic factors, the absence of mercy killing between old couples, a higher percentage of pedicide–suicides and the infrequent use of firearms.