Trauma Interventions and Systems Change in Rural Areas: The Role of the Juvenile Court Judge in Collaboration with Mental Health Professionals

This article will focus on the evolution of the collaborative work of the Louisiana Rural Trauma Services Center (LRTSC), a Center within the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, and the 23rd Judicial District, a jurisdiction in south Louisiana serving three rural parishes. We will describe how the collaboration and joint efforts, and the changes that have been made in terms of availability of evaluation and treatment resources, seem to be influencing both the educational and judicial systems in St. James Parish and potential sustainability of some of the identified resources. The article will examine how the court and the LRTSC work together with emphasis on the evaluation, reporting and recommendation processes, outcomes and benefits to date, and challenges for the future.     

THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF GUIDELINES CIRCUMVENTION: THE CASE OF FEDERAL DISTRICT COURTS*

Recent scholarship on criminal punishments increasingly highlights the importance of courtroom social contexts. Combining recent data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission (FY1997–2000) with aggregate data on federal districts, the current study examines interdistrict variations in the application of downward departures from the federal sentencing guidelines. Findings indicate that substantial variation exists in the probability of both prosecutor‐initiated substantial assistance departures and judge‐initiated downward departures. This variation is accounted for, in part, by organizational court contexts, such as caseload pressures, and by environmental considerations, such as the racial composition of the district. Additional evidence suggests that individual trial penalties and race disparities are conditioned by aggregate court contexts. Drawing on interviews with federal justice personnel, this article concludes with a discussion of future directions for research on federal guidelines departures. Part of the glory of the federal system…is that you've got this one big organization, but it can be molded to different needs…
‐ An assistant U.S. attorney ‐     

THE MULTILEVEL CONTEXT OF CRIMINAL SENTENCING: INTEGRATING JUDGE‐ AND COUNTY‐LEVEL INFLUENCES*

This study extends recent inquiries of contextual effects in sentencing by jointly examining the influence of judge and courtroom social contexts. It combines two recent years of individual sentencing data from the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing (PCS) with data on judicial background characteristics and county court social contexts. Three‐level hierarchical models are estimated to investigate the influence of judge and county contexts on individual variations in sentencing. Results indicate that nontrivial sentencing variations are associated with both individual judge characteristics and county court contexts. Judicial background factors also condition the influence of individual offender characteristics in important ways. These and other findings are discussed in relation to contemporary theoretical perspectives on courtroom decision making that highlight the importance of both judge and court contexts in sentencing. The study concludes with suggestions for future research on contextual disparities in criminal sentencing.     

SOCIAL CLASS AND DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR

The apparent refutation by self-report studies of social class-related theories of juvenile delinquency is critically reviewed. Improper conceptualization and operationalization of “social class” are considered to be primary causes of inconsistent findings. A more appropriate “underclasslearning class” model of stratification is suggested. Although no empirical support is found for a relationship between self-reported delinquent behavior and socioeconomic status of father's occupation. indications are that social class is somewhat more related to self-reported delinquency using the underclass/earning class model. However, there is no reason to expect social class to emerge as a major correlate of delinquent behavior no matter how it is measured.