Systemic Self-Regulation: A Framework for Trauma-Informed Services in Residential Juvenile Justice Programs

Most youth detained in juvenile justice facilities have extensive histories of exposure to psychological trauma. Traumatic stress plays a key role in their mental health and behavioral problems and needs, and in their safety and rehabilitation and the security and effectiveness of detention facilities. We provide an overview of the barriers to successful provision of mental health services for youths in juvenile justice facilities, including those involving youth, parents, and juvenile justice residential facility staff and administrators. Next, we discuss the relevance and potential utility of approaching mental health needs using posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and more broadly posttraumatic dysregulation, as an organizing framework. Examples of how a posttraumatic dysregulation perspective can enhance juvenile justice residential facility milieus and services are presented, with an overview of traumatic stress intervention models that have shown promise, or potentially could be deployed, in developing and sustaining trauma-informed juvenile justice facilities.     

Restorative Sentencing: Exploring the Views of the Public

Within the past decade, restorative justice has emerged as a truly global phenomenon. Although retributive justice has dominated the penal landscape, more recently, restorative principles at sentencing have attracted increased attention. Restorative sentencing emphasizes the importance of compensation and reconciliation between victims and offenders and pays less attention to establishing proportionality between the seriousness of the offense and the severity of the sentence imposed. Although voluminous (and proliferating), the scholarly literature on restorative justice has to date neglected one critical issue: public opinion with respect to this justice paradigm. Public opinion researchers too, have generally overlooked this topic. The goal of this paper is to determine which elements of the new paradigm generate public approval, and which features are likely to encounter or provoke public opposition, drawing upon related international research published in English over the past 20 years (1982–2002). The review reveals widespread support for restorative sentencing options, such as community service, compensation, and restitution, particularly when applied to young offenders. However, it also seems clear that public support for these alternatives to punitive sentencing options declines as the seriousness of the offence increases, suggesting strong public adherence to the retributive principle of proportionality in sentencing.     

Taking lawyers’ ethics seriously

Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility R. Cranston (Ed.) Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995

Legal Ethics and Legal Practice: Contemporary Issues S. Parker & S. Sampford (Eds.) Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995     

What Kinds of Trade Liberalization Agreements Do People in Developing Countries Want?

One of the most striking developments in the global economy in the past decades is the rapid proliferation of preferential trade agreements (PTAs), with many of them concluded among or with participation of developing countries. On the presumption that current popular debates on trade policy are not so much about whether citizens want free trade but rather what kinds of trade liberalization they want, we examine individual trade policy preferences with regard to PTAs that can vary in content along several dimensions. To that end we carried out conjoint choice experiments embedded in representative surveys in three developing countries that differ strongly in income levels, political system, and trade liberalization history: Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. We conceptualize trade policy preferences as preferences over the scale and scope of trade liberalization, environmental and labor standards, and labor market access (migration). Two main findings emerge. First, non-economic considerations, such as sympathy/antipathy toward particular countries and environmental and labor rights concerns influence citizens’ preferences at least as much as factors based on standard economic logic. Second, preferences over particular facets (attributes) of trade liberalization, that is PTA content, are surprisingly consistent across countries, despite strong differences in macro-economic and political context.     

A policy to promote the world's economic development with migration

This paper proposes a scheme of large-scale migration from poor countries to rich ones to speed up economic development and raise the world's economic level. The key behavioral mechanism is non-school learning; as the migrants and their children take on the culture of the rich country, they acquire the skills and attitudes necessary for modern industrial production. Rich nations will not voluntarily open their borders to such immigration. A change in the international system is therefore suggested, giving power of taxation to an international body. This body would then hold an auction among the rich countries for immigration contracts. Though the present international system makes no provision for such policies, it makes sense to discuss and analyse the policies now, to be ready for possible future changes and perhaps to help stimulate changes in the international level.     

Sexting girls: technological sovereignty and the digital

This essay explores the contemporary fact of girls sexting. Instead of theoretically granting girls a form of technological sovereignty while sexting as sexual empowerment, it pauses to take a selfie of the adult subjects – parents, educators, and sex-positive feminists and queers – attached to this form of agency for girls. If sexuality remains an alluring reparative trap by offering, through a reverse discourse sustained by the plasticity of girlish whiteness, a way of transforming girls as objects into subjects, this essay problematizes that gesture as a racially normative one, reading it further alongside the relation of technology to sexual difference. To speculate on how the scenography of sexting could be seen differently by adults, this essay suspends the search for authentic meaning and knowledge, following an intuition that we cannot presently see anything behind the image of the sext. After examining how criminal law breaks the tension in the definition of “the girl” between vulnerability and agency by extending objectification through child-pornography law, the essay takes a speculative turn with feminist readings of the question of modern technology to consider the analytic and pedagogical purchase of the non-sovereignty of the girl who sexts.