Why Listening to Children and Young People is Important in Family Justice

During the last 30 years, there has been a growing body of evidence indicating that children and young people often feel marginalized when their parents are making critical decisions that will shape their young lives, and they are calling for family justice professionals to hear their voices. This article explores the research evidence, examines the relevant theories about child development, and demonstrates how a focus on age‐related competency fails to take account of children's subjective meanings about their lives. The authors consider a model of participation first designed to understand adult participation in government and show how this can be usefully applied to understanding children's participation in family justice.     

DEVELOPMENT AND FRACTURE OF A DISCIPLINE: LEGACIES OF THE SCHOOL OF CRIMINOLOGY AT BERKELEY

In the early twentieth century, the University of California—Berkeley opened its doors to police professionals for instruction in “police science.” This program ultimately developed into the full‐fledged School of Criminology, whose graduates helped shape American criminology and criminal justice until well into the 1970s. Scholarship at the School of Criminology eventually fractured into three distinct traditions: “Administrative criminology” applied scientific methods in pursuit of refining law enforcement practices, “law and society” coupled legal scholarship with social scientific methods, and “radical criminology” combined Marxist critiques of the state with community activism. Those scientific traditions relied on competing epistemic premises and normative aspirations, and they drew legitimacy from different sources. Drawing on oral histories and archival data permits a neo‐institutional analysis of how each of these criminological traditions emerged, acquired stability, and subsided. The Berkeley School of Criminology provides fertile ground to examine trends in the development of criminal justice as a profession, criminology as a discipline and its place in elite universities, the uncoupling of criminology from law and society scholarship, and criminal justice policy's disenchantment with the academy. These legacies highlight how the development of modern criminology and the professionalization of American law enforcement find precedent in events that originate at Berkeley.     

Courting Compliance: Case Managers as “Double Agents” in the Mental Health Court

An ethnographic study of four Midwest mental health courts was focused on how case managers influence the judicial response to offender noncompliance. Mental health courts, which bear little resemblance to traditional work group models, are staffed by teams of legal and social service professionals working collaboratively toward reducing recidivism and community reintegration for high‐risk offenders. Few studies, however, have explored how treatment providers practice their trade in this new court organization. I investigate how case management professionals, working at the intersections of the social welfare and criminal justice systems, leverage courtroom decision making that results in greater leniency or enhanced punishment. The findings suggest that mental‐health‐court case managers act as boundary spanners in terms of their strategic use of resources to facilitate treatment goals. I conclude that case managers act as “double agents” challenging the state to advocate for clemency while enforcing client rules to uphold the integrity of the court.     

Online Virtual Supervised Visitation During the COVID‐19 Pandemic: One State's Experience

This paper describes how supervised visitation programs in Florida rapidly transitioned from in‐person supervised visits to virtual, online visits during the COVID‐19 pandemic to protect the health of families and staff. Structured telephonic interviews and an online survey revealed that although most program directors had not previously developed guiding policies or hosted such visits, within weeks they were providing hundreds of online “virtual visits” between children and their non‐custodial parents to maintain the crucial parent–child relationship in a safe manner. Vignettes from this data provide lessons regarding parent and child reactions to virtual visits, advantages and disadvantages of virtual visits from the programs' perspectives, and levels of enthusiasm for using virtual visits going forward. In addition, the data includes recommendations for new program guidelines and protocols for the ongoing use of virtual visits. Although it is too early to call these policies best practices, the study does offer insight into the challenges and opportunities afforded by virtual visits and can inform disaster planning that supervised visitation programs develop to prepare for inevitable future disruptions in services to families.     

Law‐Linked Justice and Existence‐Linked Justice

Abstract. Justice as a manifestation of “the just” is an evasive concept. On the one hand there is the law, an operation run by professionals. On the other hand there are the citizens the law is meant for. Generally speaking the law strives for justice. But the law has to protect many different interests and must work through legal devices. Therefore the justice that emerges from it is necessarily a legal compromise. For the citizens the legal rules are a given reality. Generally they will agree that the law is there to achieve justice but legal arguments that justify a rule or decision cannot have the same value for them. In cases that affect them personally, justice will be a personal, existential experience, which may be incompatible with legal justice. It is hard to keep these two forms of justice under one roof. In order to make this easier this paper proposes a conceptual split between “law‐linked justice” and “existence‐linked justice.” It is argued that the law cannot in truth to its rational origin ignore the citizens’ experience of justice, out of the ordinary as they may be.     

Professionalizing Prison: Primitive Professionalization and the Administrative Defense of Eastern State Penitentiary, 1829–1879

This article describes the process of “primitive professionalization”—the efforts of a small set of actors to claim professional status before their field has professionalized. Using a case study of Eastern State Penitentiary (1829–1879), I examine the strategies by which one prison's administrators claimed status as professionals—those whose command of a specialized knowledge grants authority within their domain. Eastern's administrators deployed a series of evolving discursive strategies aimed at establishing themselves as professionals long before more formal, field‐wide efforts to professionalize criminal justice. These strategies allowed Eastern's administrators to establish their professional status without traditional status markers of national networks, college degrees, or special training, which emerged later. Beyond illustrating a new pathway to professionalization, examining criminal justice professionalization at this early stage illuminates the early prison's precarious position and the internecine warfare among actors competing to control its meaning.     

Immigrants’ interaction with the police in Finland: Is it distorted or inflammatory?

One enduring conflict area in police–minorities relations is the distrust of the police by minorities and consequently, the low level of confidence in the police among racial minorities. This stems from the impact of race in policing; and the perception that racial discrimination is a feature of criminal justice systems across the world has intensified. Moreover, race controversy is not new in police work. It is against this background that many police establishments are becoming increasingly frustrated by ethnic minority /immigrant allegations that they are being singled out as easy targets for police stop and search practices. In Finland, however, only little is known about immigrants’ views of police interaction, and perceptions of police discrimination in the country. Moreover, the police force in Finland may also be characterised by discriminatory mechanisms which are found in police institutions of other Western states where there has been more extensive research on the issue. The aim of the present study is to examine the attitude of immigrants toward the police by seeking to place the patterns of immigrants’ interaction with the police into context using their experiences as the basis of the analysis. The study also evaluates the impact of “ethnicity” in immigrants’ police experiences in our attempt to better understand how immigrants are subjected to stereotypical behaviour within the criminal justice system despite the fact that the police are tasked with carrying out their mandate to protect every citizen in the country. Thus, the interactions of immigrants with the police are our focus of analysis in our quest to understand new challenges brought about by the new immigrants in Finland. One thing is certain, however: police are not immune from racial conflict; as they continue to operate within our societies regardless of the ethnic composition of the country must be considered as a major policy issue of legal analysis. Therefore, the cultural and contextual nature of immigrants’ interaction with the police and the author's analysis will serve as the basis for assessing what may be required to ensure that discrimination is eliminated from the criminal justice system in the country.     

城隍神的构造原理:法律与宗教互动的古代中国经验

超出世俗理性主义的法史研究模式,重建古代中国法律与宗教的真实联系,颇有必要。古代法官的司法经验中附着于城隍神身上的“神迹”不完全是神道设教的虚构,而可能是真实的个案。城隍神作为正义守护神的构成原理具有四个部分:儒法合流的理性主义法律体制不足以解决法律全面实施的难题;神道设教的传统国策可以发挥神灵震慑的作用;只有在城隍神的法庭上才可能实现远比国法所能企及的更大的正义,就是使一个人对其生前死后一切行为负责的因果报应正义;源源不断的报应故事使神迹和神明建立起了因果联系。还原正义守护神的构成原理有助于理解为什么与宗教疏离的法律会失灵。     

The King County (Washington) Systems Integration Initiative: A First Look at the Kent District Dual System Youth Pilot Program

King County is one of five counties in Washington State participating in the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Models for Change juvenile justice reform initiative. One key aspect of King County's Models for Change participation involves ongoing “systems integration” work intended to improve how youth who have cross‐over involvement in multiple systems—e.g., juvenile justice, child welfare, education, mental health, and/or others—are handled. These cross‐over cases often present a range of challenges to juvenile courts including substantial risk factors that increase their likelihood of continuing system involvement. This article provides a first look at an emerging pilot project in King County that is intended to improve how cross‐over cases are handled by child welfare and juvenile probation with the longer term goal of improving outcomes for these difficult cases.     

The “Right Paper”: Developing Legal Literacy in a Legal Self‐Help Clinic

Legal self‐help is the fastest‐growing segment of legal services in the United States, and a significant addition to the repertoire of programs aimed at opening up access to justice in the civil legal system. Few studies, however, have examined how such services work in practice. Through ethnographic research and analysis of meetings between unrepresented litigants and attorneys offering advice in a legal self‐help clinic, this article expands the empirical investigation of access to justice to consider what legal self‐help looks like in actual practice. In this article, I follow the concept of the “right paper” to analyze the process through which legal self‐help litigants develop legal literacy, including the role of lawyers in helping them to do so. The article concludes by discussing what such practices reveal about recent efforts to open up access to justice and also about the dynamics through which people come to think about law and, especially, how to use it.     

Co-constituting narrative: the role of researcher identity bids in qualitative interviews with women ex-offenders

Narrative criminology draws upon the stories of the research participants to better understand crime. These narratives are shaped not only by a range of structural, institutional and individual factors, but by dynamics within the interview itself. As both participant and interviewer deploy narrative techniques, they co-constitute identity meanings during the interview process. This study examines interviews with 30 women recently released from incarceration to identify ways that the researcher constructed and “bid” for identity meanings through narrative during the interview process. Specifically analyzed are the researcher’s “small stories” put forth in response to participants during the interview exchange. Ultimately, the co-constitutive nature of interview dynamics suggest that the researcher’s identity bids via small stories have implications for how participants assert their own identity meanings, account for their experiences, and ultimately orient or conceptualize their futures.     

WHEN THE COST IS TOO GREAT: THE EMOTIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACT ON CHILDREN OF INCARCERATING THEIR PARENTS FOR DRUG OFFENCES1

The advent of the modern “war on drugs” and its accompanying “lock 'em up and throw away the key” crime policies largely explain the evolution of mass incarceration in the U.S. and account for much of the emotional and psychological pain caused to children who have lost their parents to long prison sentences. It is by reducing reliance on incarceration to tackle the “drug problem” in the United States that there will be a positive impact on reducing the number of parents being separated from their children for inordinate amounts of time, thereby potentially reducing the negative emotional and psychological impact on children. Aiding parents combat their addiction outside of prison walls is perhaps to most sensible criminal justice policy in addressing the needs of children who are caught in the cross‐fire of the war on drugs. In the meantime, as policy makers review, assess, and, eventually, reform draconian drug laws and sentencing policies, it is imperative that front‐line service providers who work with children and family and juvenile court judges be mindful of the emotional and psychological impact that parental incarceration has on youth. A more in‐depth understanding of the complexities of these young people's life experiences will hopefully enable the development of appropriate support services.     

Summonsing Criminal Desistance: Convicted Felons’ Perspectives on Jury Service

This exploratory study is the first to examine how convicted felons view the jury process and their role in that process. Data derived from interviews with former and prospective felon‐jurors in Maine, the only US jurisdiction that does not restrict a convicted felon's opportunity to serve as a juror, reveal that participants displayed an idealized view of jury service, stressing a commitment to serve conscientiously. Additionally, inclusion in the jury process affirmed their transitions from “offenders” to “nonoffenders.” In response, participants exhibited a sense of particularized self‐worth, emphasizing that negative experiences with the criminal justice system make one a more effective juror. In sum, this study suggests that among convicted felons, inclusion in the jury process may prompt conformity with the “ideal juror” role, facilitate prosocial identity shifts by mitigating the “felon” label, and help former offenders to find personal value.     

INTERORGANIZATIONAL UTILITY OF WELFARE STIGMA IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM*

The appropriation of “welfare stigma” or stereotypes about poor people's overreliance and abuse of public aid in two core criminal justice functions is examined: felony adjudication in a court system and space allocation in a jail. Through a comparative ethnographic study in which an abductive analysis of data (20 months of fieldwork) was used, we show that criminal justice gatekeepers utilize welfare stigma to create stricter eligibility criteria for due process in criminal courts and occupancy in jails. Specifically, the number of court appearances, motions, trials, jail beds, food, showers, and medical services is considered by professionals to be the benefits that individuals seek to access and abuse. Professionals view their role as preventing (rather than granting) access to these resources. The comparative nature of our data reveals that welfare stigma has interorganizational utility by serving two different organizational goals: It streamlines convictions in courts, which pulls defendants through adjudication, and conversely, it expands early release from jails, which pulls inmates out of the custody population. In the context of diminishing social safety nets, our findings have implications for understanding how discretion is exercised in an American criminal justice system increasingly tasked with the distribution of social services to the urban poor.     

The Evolution of Balanced and Restorative Justice

Maloney, Armstrong, and Romig presented a portrait of “Joey,” who was the exemplar of what was wrong with the juvenile justice system, in 1988 when they published The Balanced Approach in this Journal. In response, they reimagined a juvenile justice system predicated on balancing three fundamental goals—protection of community, accountability to victims, and development of competencies to prepare juvenile court‐involved youth for productive roles in their communities. The authors examine the evolution of balanced and restorative justice and re‐imagine how Joey's life may have been different at critical junctures of his juvenile court involvement.     

Delivering Justice in Indigenous Sentencing Courts: What This Means for Judicial Officers,Elders, Community Representatives,and Indigenous Court Workers

Indigenous sentencing courts are now an established form of innovative justice practice in most Australian jurisdictions. Whether such processes, which involve the participation of local community elders or representatives in sentencing an offender, provide a “better” form of justice is still up for debate. Recidivism analyses have yet to find that these courts are more likely to reduce reoffending than their mainstream counterparts. Some scholars argue that this is not the sole purpose of the courts and that other measures of “success” should be utilised when evaluating their performance. This article uses interviews with judicial officers, elders, community representatives, and Indigenous and non‐Indigenous court workers to explore what the courts are seeking to achieve and how that translates into a different form of doing justice.     

Law and Family Formation Among LGBQ‐Parent Families

This article addresses how the law affects family formation among families with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) parents in the United States. Our discussion draws on a socio‐legal approach to law that focuses not only on the law on the books (what we refer to as “legal barriers”) but also on issues like how the law is practiced, how people experience the law in everyday life, and how the law serves as an interpretive framework through which people understand themselves and their families (what we refer to as “social barriers”). In our review, we highlight how attorneys can play a role in valuing and advancing rights for LGBQ‐parent families and LGBTQ prospective parents.     

The Role of Western Religious Values in Peacemaking for Divorcing Families

Peace (wholeness and integrity) is to be sought as the highest goal in the divorce process, affecting not only the divorcing couple but their family and community as well. The value of “community” found in the three major Western religious traditions suggests that more than just the immediate family should be involved in crafting divorce settlements and that the involvement of clergy may aid in the divorce process, especially in providing rich religious metaphors and exempla to promote peaceful negotiations. Other religious values such as “humanity in the divine image,” “love,” and “the fullness of time” can be useful in working with the divorcing couple to allow their stories to be told, provide time to sort out their complex emotions, and help reduce the impulse to see the other solely as an enemy to be eliminated in battle. “Sin and atonement” can serve an important role in restorative justice, while “the delayed arrival of the divine kingdom” provides a reasonable way to assess what determines success, both for the divorcing couple and for divorce professionals.

Key Points for the Family Court Community:
• Religious values found in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can be consciously utilized to help divorcing couples separate more peacefully.
• Providing opportunities for each spouse to be fully heard and seen is a crucial component in helping to bring more peace into the divorce process.

     

Advancing Accountability: Moving Toward Victim Restoration

One of the goals of Pennsylvania's juvenile justice system is the “imposition of accountability” for offenses committed. This White Paper, originally published in 2006, takes the position that true accountability requires juvenile offenders to repair the harm caused by their offending behavior and to understand and acknowledge the wrongfulness of their actions, their responsibility for causing harm, and the impact of the crime on the crime victim and community. It identifies system responsibilities, restorative practices, and outcomes relative to accountability. This White Paper was the result of debate among focus group participants under the auspices of the State Advisory Group.