Suchergebnisse

Juvenile justice in Ireland is at a time of transition. The recently enacted Children Act, 2001 is the first piece of legislative change in almost a century and once fully implemented will provide for much needed change. However, at the time of this study juvenile justice in Ireland was still legislated for by the Children Act, 1908 and there was increasing concern that the needs and rights of children in conflict with the law were not being met. There was very little in the way of empirical evidence however, to validate these claims. This study examines the entire population (N=68) of children on remand in Ireland during four time periods, and the results are presented in three sections. Section A provides a background profile of the population and illustrates the high levels of social, familial and educational disadvantage experienced by the young people. It also demonstrates the large extent to which these young people had already been in contact with various welfare and justice agencies prior to their period of remand. Section B specifically examines the period of detention on remand, and illustrates some of the problems faced by the young people including the large number of children detained for welfare reasons rather than their offending behaviour and excessive periods of time in detention due to a lack of appropriate facilities. This section also uses a flowchart of the juvenile justice systems to illustrate the position of each individual within it. Section C provides more detailed information relating to each child's 'remand episode'' and uses the flowchart to illustrate the cycle of repeat remands and lengthy periods of detention. Finally this study discusses some of the findings in more detail including the relationship between school failure and crime, particular issues associated with female offenders, the number of welfare cases in the remand system and the deprivation of liberty and children's rights.

Martha Ojeda, who once worked in Mexican factories on the U.S. border, talks about efforts to improve conditions there.

This paper aims to contribute to the debate on making probation practice 'desistance-focused'. It does this through considering the body of knowledge on responding to trauma through 'bearing witness' to the person's story – attending to their values and lived experience – and applying this to probation practice. It addresses why the literature on trauma has relevance to work with people who have offended. Then it explores the epistemological, performative, moral and political dimensions of 'bearing witness' and the relevance of each of these to desistance. It highlights the potentially critical role of the audience (in this case the probation practitioner) in the co-construction of the desistance narrative. Additionally, the paper argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the moral space in which such narratives are co-constructed. In a context where the voices of people who have offended are silenced and their experiences of victimisation or structural violence are written out, I suggest that 'being present and being with another' (Naef, 2006: 146) enacts a moral responsibility to support a transition from object to subject and to recognise and endorse the humanity of those who have committed crimes. The paper provides a practice example of 'bearing witness' to desistance. Finally, it addresses potential challenges in asking probation officers to 'bear witness' to desistance.

Scholars have long argued over the dimensionality of legislative voting. Using scores from ten groups, this research note shows that analysis of even basically unidimensional voting can benefit from consideration of domain‐specific ideology. Although correlations between interest group scores and DW‐NOMINATE—the most widely used measure of congressional ideology—are generally high, I find several areas of concern. First, correlations have increased over time, suggesting a need for caution when using the more general scores for historical analysis. Second, the policy‐specific interest group scores differ substantially on aggregate measures, such as the location of the median, that political scientists use to test models of the political process. Third, at least one policy area where party is crosscutting, agriculture, is not well captured by NOMINATE scores. This research note concludes with an example of how the use of domain‐specific group scores can shed light on the role of party and constituency in voting.