A PRACTITIONER'S PERSPECTIVE ON UNIFIED FAMILY COURTS: CASE STUDIES

As a summary of simple examples demonstrating practical advantages of a family court, this article relates a few experiences from the perspective of a family law attorney who practices regularly in the Fulton County Family Division in Atlanta.     

COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES ON SOCIAL CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY: THE ROLE OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION

The political and the economic spheres increasingly overlap. Consumption is viewed not only as an economic act, but also as an act of political and moral significance. Due to the blurring of the commercial and the political spheres, consumers use their purchasing power as a carrot and a stick for corporations to comply with corporate social responsibility (CSR) standards. As a consequence, corporate communication strategies tend to highlight commitment to CSR standards, portraying companies as “good corporate citizens.” Conversely, other stakeholders expose unethical business practices so as to induce corporate change. Both sides tend to invoke freedom of expression with a view to opposing limitations on their communication strategies. Taking two well-known examples as a starting point, the present article explores the role of freedom of expression as a means to incite corporate actors to both adopt and comply with CSR standards from a comparative perspective. Using an economic framework, it argues that non-commercial expression critical of corporate practices deserves a higher level of protection than corporate communication strategies.     

Gender and Race Differences in Delinquent Careers

Abstract Studies of delinquent careers have often tracked only male offenders, and have almost always failed to explore the interaction of race and gender in delinquency. This study tracks a cohort of youth whose first referral to juvenile court was in 1980, and explores the role played by both race and gender in official delinquent careers. Findings reveal that both race and gender play a significant role in official delinquency. Looking first at female delinquency, this research finds that white and nonwhite females do not differ significantly in the types of offenses they commit. Moreover, if girls are “chronic” delinquents, their offenses are most often trivial rather than serious. With males, racial differences emerge in both seriousness and chronic nature of delinquency. Nonwhite males in this cohort are more likely to be referred for personal offenses and less likely to be referred for public order and victimless offenses. Nonwhite males are also significantly more likely to become recidivists, and to have more seriously delinquent careers. This article discusses the implications of these findings, particularly with reference to the “convergence theory” of delinquency, which suggests that race plays a stronger role than gender in female delinquency. Finally, the article considers the policy implications of the current range of definitions of “chronic” delinquency.     

Familial functioning as a support system for adolescents' postdetention success

Youths transitioning out of detention are particularly in need of support systems that can divert them from recidivism. This article examines the relationship between incarcerated youths' sense of their families' functioning and their perceived likelihood for postdetention success. Despite the control of background variables, results reveal that delinquents who indicated stronger familial functioning also reported a greater likelihood of future success. Although interventions that focus on improving the supportive capacity of families have shown great promise, treatment drop-out rates remain high. To explore incarcerated youths' view of family focused interventions, respondents rated the potential utility of family and nonfamily focused intervention options. A majority of respondents reported that family focused interventions would be helpful. A group of respondents, overrepresented by adolescents with low family functioning, reported that this type of intervention would not be helpful. These results are discussed in terms of their impact on offering family focused interventions for juveniles.     

The consequences of error: Recidivism prediction and civil-libertarian ratios

The utility of recidivistic prediction is limited by the false positive problem: predictions of failure (recidivism) that do not occur. False negatives (predicted successes but observed failures) are also worrisome, and together both types of error can be formally evaluated by what Blumstein, Farrington, and Moitra call the civil-libertarian ratio: the ratio of the subjective cost of a false positive to a false negative. Choice of a recidivistic criterion and selection of a proportion of offenders for criminal justice intervention have implications for the evaluation of the disutility or subjective cost associated with various civil-libertarian ratios. Logistic regression models of four recidivistic criteria are evaluated to demonstrate how base rate (observed failure rate) and selection ratio (proportion selected to fail) affect the disutility associated with a range of civil-libertarian ratios. Use of civil-libertarian ratios by criminal justice policy makers is demonstrated. Predictive utility is relatively difficult to achieve for rare recidivistic events if the decisions involve severe deprivation of liberty (incarceration decisions). Predictive utility is easier to achieve for more common forms of recidivism or in decision contexts where there is less concern for false positives, such as for “intermediate sanctions.”