Youth justice conferencing and indigenous over-representation in the Queensland juvenile justice system: a micro-simulation case study

Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is firmly established in Australian juvenile justice, and legislated conferencing schemes are operating in all Australian states and territories. While there is some variation in the terms used to describe restorative justice conferences (e.g., family group conferencing, family conferencing, or youth justice conferencing), there is much more consistency in how the conferencing process is managed across Australian jurisdictions. In Queensland youth justice conferencing is a process that brings together an offender, the victim and their supporters to discuss the harm caused by the offending behaviour and provide the young person with an opportunity to take responsibility for his or her behaviour and make amends. This paper begins by briefly sketching the development of restorative justice conferencing in Queensland and describes the Juvenile Justice Simulation Model (JJSM), a micro-simulation model developed for criminal justice policy analysis in Queensland, Australia. We use this micro-simulation model to conduct an experimental exploration of the effects that youth justice conferencing has on system-wide outcomes for indigenous young people. The model simulates the impact of interventions up until 2011 on the number of finalised youth justice court appearances. Our results indicate that youth justice conferencing is unlikely to reduce the over-representation of indigenous young people in the juvenile justice system. The simulations demonstrated that, by the 2011, youth justice conferencing would result in a 12.5% decrease in finalised court appearances. Unfortunately, this decrease was more apparent for non-indigenous young people (13.7% decrease in court appearances) than for indigenous young people, who had a 10.5% decrease in court appearances. This differential impact of conferencing is due to the different court appearance profiles between indigenous and non-indigenous young offenders, with indigenous young people initiating offending at an earlier age and offending more frequently than non-indigenous young offenders.     

HLA DQ alpha typing of forensic specimens by amplification restriction fragment polymorphism (ARFP) analysis.

The alleles present at the HLA DQ alpha locus may be typed by either allele specific oligonucleotide (ASO) probing or by restriction mapping, referred to here as amplification restriction fragment polymorphism (ARFP) analysis. ASO typing relies upon hybridization principles, whereas ARFP typing relies upon restriction site analysis. Dot-blot ASO typings which are of doubtful interpretation may be directly checked by ARFP analysis. Aliquots of the PCR products amplified using the commercial Amplitype HLA DQ alpha system are digested with suitable restriction endonucleases. Electrophoresis, blotting and detection of biotin-labelled restriction fragments provides a sensitive and robust typing method suited to forensic analysis.     

Managing Racial Diversity: Matching Internal Strategies with Environmental Needs

Although demographic diversity has been of paramount concern to researchers and practitioners in public management, studies exploring managerial strategies to capitalize on and respond to the needs of diverse client populations are scarce. This article examines strategies for managing diversity as a way to buffer environmental challenges in service delivery and performance resulting from heterogeneous client demands. Findings suggest that administrators prioritize diversity efforts when faced with higher levels of regulatory violations (a performance measure). A higher percentage of black residents is associated with lower service quality. However, the effect of managerial strategies for diversity on performance is conditioned by the racial composition of the clients: as the percentage of black nursing home residents increases, diversity management efforts are associated with a lower number of regulatory violations. Similarly, at higher levels of racial heterogeneity, diversity management efforts are associated with fewer regulatory violations.     

Parent-child Communication,Social Norms,and the Development of Cyber Aggression in Early Adolescence

Journal of Youth and Adolescence - To understand the development of cyber aggression during adolescence, it is important to consider the temporal variability of its potential predictors. This study...     

Constitutional overperformance: an empirical study of de facto protection of rights with no de jure equivalents

European Journal of Law and Economics - In this paper we aim to contribute to the debate on successful enforcement of constitutional rules and its determinants by extending the focus to the...     

Mitigating Intergroup Conflict: Effectiveness of Qualifying Subjective Justice Views as an Intervention Technique in Comparison to Empathy Induction

Social Justice Research - Intergroup conflicts can be triggered and perpetuated by collective perceptions of injustice. In two experiments, we applied the qualifying of subjective justice views, a...     

Mapping the use of knowledge in policymaking: barriers and facilitators from a subjectivist perspective (1990–2020)

Policy Sciences - The use of knowledge and evidence in policymaking is a recurrent topic of research due to its scientific and policy relevance. The existing and expansive body of literature has...     

The Competition for Pupillages at the Bar of England and Wales (2000–2004)1

Fair entry into the legal profession promotes legal legitimacy and the inclusiveness of the administration of justice. This article asks which individual factors predict success in the competition for entry to the Bar of England and Wales. Using data from 2,178 British aspiring barristers, it finds that university attended and attainment at university and in the BVC were the strongest predictors of gaining pupillage. Ethnic minorities were initially disadvantaged in the competition for pupillages, but this became statistically insignificant when taking into account attainment and type of university. However, those aged 30 and above were still disadvantaged in securing pupillages when controlling for attainment and university. The article highlights the challenges of fair selection into a graduate‐entry legal profession. Entry is reliant on the profile of graduates emerging from the prior education system where ascribed characteristics such as ethnicity, attainment, and university type influence opportunities.     

Citizenship and the Biopolitics of Post-nationalist Ireland

In June 2004 voters in the Republic of Ireland endorsed a constitutional amendment to deprive children born on the island of Ireland of their previously automatic right to Irish citizenship. This change came amid increasing immigration and so-called 'baby tourism', whereby non-national mothers were alleged to be coming to Ireland to give birth for the sole purpose of bestowing Irish citizenship on their children. This article sets the referendum in its historical and contemporary context. Along with recent jurisprudence of the Irish Supreme Court, the amendment betokens a distinctive biopolitics orchestrated according to neo-liberal themes consonant with Ireland's membership of the European Union and its foreign direct investment strategy. As such, the amendment confirms the shift in Irish constitutional history from autarkic nationalism to cosmopolitan post-nationalism embodied in the Belfast Agreement of 1998.