Getting Tough With Juvenile Offenders: Ignoring the Best Interests of the Child

Abstract Despite a declining delinquency rate, legislatures and courts are getting tough with juveniles. Such policies are antithetical to the “best interest of the child” philosophy and counter-productive to treatment. Protecting the child's rights to due process and individualized treatment must be enhanced, not subverted. The laws which govern the behavior of citizens, companies, institutions, and various other elements in our society are man-made. “Public policy is whatever governments choose to do or not to do.”¹ However, these decisions are not made in a vacuum. They are ultimately made by the confluence of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the government that are, and of necessity must be, at least tangentially responsive to perceived public needs. “Courts respond … to societal pressures; they are moved by the same tides of public opinion as are legislatures and executives.”² The resultant public policies and the programs created to administer them reflect these societal needs and respond to them accordingly. The evolution of the Children's Code in America, its eventual adoption into law and its subsequent changes over the years mark these shifts in society's view of its children. Throughout this slow and sometimes grudging process, the legal status of children has made numerous gains. Today, children hold a special place in our culture and until recently, the Children's Code was utilized to assist them in maintaining and enhancing that status. However, within the last few years this tide of evolutionary gains has turned into a flood of erosion of due process rights. Yet:     

General strain theory and the development of stressors and substance use over time: An empirical examination

Little research has examined whether General Strain Theory (GST) can account for continuity in illicit behavior over their time. The current study fills this void by testing the ability of GST to account for the association between adolescent and adult substance use. Four mechanisms that Agnew argues lead to behavioral continuity—a direct effect of negative emotionality and low constraint on substance use, evocative and active selection, passive selection, and stressor amplification—are examined using structural equation modeling. Drawing from the broader stress literature, an additional pathway—stress proliferation—is also tested. This research uses two unique datasets, which together provide information on the lives of high risk individuals from birth through adulthood. Support for GST explanations of continuity is mixed. The direct and moderating effects of negative emotionality and low constraint as well as the more dynamic aspects of the stress process, like proliferation and amplification, received the most empirical support. It is argued that more attention should be directed to exploring the social processes through which stressors develop over time.     

Dead or Alive? Explaining the Long-Term Survival Chances of Interest Groups

Interest groups are crucial for the representation of interests in politics. An important aspect is not only which groups are formed, but also which groups survive over time. This paper outlines and empirically investigates hypotheses about which factors explain interest group survival. The empirical literature on survival has been limited by the lack of actual survival data and has instead relied on self-assessment data on the likelihood of survival. The article examines survival using a unique dataset that covers a population of interest groups, spans over three decades (1976–2010), and contains data on interest group characteristics and information about whether the groups survived. As expected, resources such as members and employees increase the probability of survival. However, a privileged position in the decision-making process, a largely neglected factor in previous studies, also affects survival. This implies that insider groups are likely to be overrepresented in interest group populations.     

Friendship and environmental politics in childhood

A variety of scholarship across disciplines suggests that an environmental ethic begins in childhood. However, few studies have been conducted with children to learn more about the factors that contribute to an environmental ethic. This paper aims to investigate children's pre-reflexive political engagements with their physical environment in an effort to learn more about the development of an environmental ethic. Through an ethnographic study with children aged 9–11 in rural New Zealand, analysis shows that children's relationship with their environment is substantially influenced by their social relationships with friends and family. Therefore, this paper argues that to reach a better understanding of the development of children's environmental politics, more research is needed to explore the politics of friendship.