Drug Courts and the Logic of Coerced Treatment1

This article examines the social and historical significance of coerced drug treatment within the criminal justice system. Drug courts, the most prominent example of this approach, serve as a case study to explore how seemingly contradictory perspectives on substance use—therapeutic and punitive—are merged to justify increased criminal justice oversight of defendants in the name of facilitating recovery. Drawing on an analysis of drug court organizational documents and interviews with key advocates, this article (1) examines the punitive, therapeutic, and medical knowledge drug court advocates draw on and construct to justify an increased role for the courts in solving the problem of addiction, and (2) links these theories historically to broader discussions about the causes of crime and the courts’ role in solving social problems. Overall, this article considers how scientific theories are fused with moral considerations in the name of an “enlightened” criminal justice approach to complex social problems.     

Curriculum Access for Pupils with Disabilities: an Irish experience

For young people with physical disabilities in Ireland, gaining access to a school represents only the first tentative step on the way to full participation in the curriculum alongside their peers. While government policy explicitly favours the inclusion of young people with disabilities within mainstream education there is little evidence of planning at a systemic level to facilitate this process. This small scale, qualitative study attempts to ascertain the reality of inclusion within mainstream settings for young people with physical disabilities. The results indicate that the young people often experienced exclusion from full curricular access. The implications of these findings are discussed in relation to developing inclusive structures that facilitate curricular access for young people with disabilities within Irish post-primary schools.     

‘The Mighty Pillar of the Family’: Young People's Vocabularies on Household Gender Arrangements in the Asia‐Pacific Region

In the light of women's increased labour force participation and the demands of western feminism for men's participation in housework and childcare, this article analyses vocabularies on these issues among young people in Australia, USA and Canada and seven countries in Asia. While very few young people in any of the samples use explicitly feminist justifications for their statements, there is high support for sharing housework when both partners are in paid work. By contrast, the strong support for role reversal — for men being ‘house husbands’— is confined to the western samples. The article explores reasons for these differences based in respondents’ domestic experiences and national family policies. Where many of the western respondents rely on equality or individualism, the Asian respondents are more likely to understand the role of the husband and wife in the context of their duties to each other and the nation or to assert the existence of gender differences between men and women.     

Parental perceptions of risks with older teenagers who have severe learning difficulties contrasted with the young people's views and experiences

The majority of school leavers over two years from two special schools for pupils with severe learning disabilities were individually interviewed (N = 34), as were their parents (N = 38). Parental reports stressed the amount of care and supervision required by these young people. They viewed them as vulnerable to various different hazards such as crossing roads and only a minority were prepared to take the risk of teaching them. However more of the young people felt they were capable of certain tasks. Parents had a particular fear that their son or daughter may be taken advantage of sexually even though the bigger risk—going by the young people's reports—is verbal abuse and bullying from peers. A model is proposed of the influences on parental assessments of risks. This might be used in arriving at ‘shared risk‐taking’ strategies with professionals and the young people during the later years of schooling.     

(Re)Seeing Black girls: intersections of liberalism,difference, and the hidden curriculum

This article analyses the race and gender norms embedded in the verbal and visual discourse at an internationally acclaimed secondary magnet school in Philadelphia. While scholars have documented the visual learning of adolescents and elementary school-aged youth of colour extensively, few have focused exclusively on the nature of visual learning for young Black women in and around urban schools. The nature of looking and the visual is a highly contested and political process in the twenty-first century urban context. Images saturate the cityscape; these images teach. Thus this article examines the specific lessons related to race, gender, and place young Black women learn from the school adults who shape the visual culture of their school environment. Based on an ethnographic, photographic and discourse analysis study, this article argues that even in the context of an award-winning, progressive, liberal-minded school culture, young working class Black women are often softly encouraged to change and or are re-programmed into more palatable, commodifiable versions of themselves that both sustain and advance the school’s identity as different. This ‘re-programming’ often requires young Black women to alter their dress, speech, and physical demeanour in order to find belonging in a larger school culture dominated by a discourse of inclusivity and diversity.     

Do magnet and charter schools exacerbate or ameliorate inequality?

School choice typically refers to opportunities to enroll youth in public and/or private educational alternatives to traditional neighborhood public schools. While these options continue to grow in the United States under the umbrella of school choice, magnet and charter schools are the most common forms of public school choice. In this article, we review the development of school choice and the differing historical and philosophical origins of magnet and charter schools. We then summarize what we know about the extent to which these public choice options exacerbate or ameliorate two forms of inequality—academic achievement and school segregation by race and class. Research suggests that magnet schools often encourage racial and class diversity, while charters contribute to racial and socioeconomic isolation. While low‐income minority students may benefit academically from attending magnet schools, it is unclear whether charter schools have any effect on achievement when comparing charter school students to their counterparts in traditional public school. We expect that continued growth of magnet schools will likely promote school diversity both within and between districts, though some types of magnets may also inadvertently promote segregation. However, expansion of the charter school sector will heighten school segregation and exacerbate racial and socioeconomic isolation.     

School choice's idealized premises and unfulfilled promises: How school markets simulate options,encourage decoupling and deception,and deepen disadvantages

In school choice systems, families choose among publicly funded schools, and schools compete for students and resources. Using neoinstitutionalist and relational inequality theories, our article reinterprets recent critical sociological and education research to show how such markets involve actors' enacting myths; these beliefs and their associated practices normalized white, privileged consumption as a basis for revamping public education as market exchanges between schools and families. Proponents argue that choice empowers individuals, focuses organizations on improving quality, and benefits society more broadly by reducing inequality and segregation. We argue that such school choice myths' excessive emphases on individual decision‐making and provider performance obscure the actual impacts of school choice systems upon people, organizations, and society. First, rather than enlarging alternatives that families can easily research, select, and (if needed) exit, school choice systems often simulate options, especially for disadvantaged populations. Second, rather than focusing schools' efforts on performance, innovation, and accountability, they can encourage organizational decoupling, homogeneity, and deception. Third, rather than reducing societal harms, they can deepen inequalities and alienation. Future research should examine both how markets are animated by bounded relationality—routines that enable them to form, maintain, and complete exchanges with organizations—and how activism can challenge marketization.     

Do we have what it takes to put all students on the graduation path?

According to current estimates, more than a quarter of all students and over 40 percent of African American and Hispanic students do not graduate from high school on time. The vast majority of those young people who do not graduate with their peers drop out. The enormous costs to these individuals, their communities, and our society require us to invest in systems that accurately identify young people at risk of dropping out and provide the supports necessary to keep them on track to graduation. This chapter offers a framework for action that calls on communities to identify the scale and scope of the dropout problem and understand why students disengage from school; transform or replace low-performing schools; install early warning and multitiered response systems that provide comprehensive, targeted, and intensive supports to students in and out of school; establish supportive policies and resource allocations; and build community will and capacity so positive changes are deeply implemented and sustained.     

CONTESTED PORTRAYALS: Medical and Legal Social Control of Juvenile Sex Offenders

While juvenile courts were originally designed to respond to troubled youth by providing treatment appropriate to the needs of individual offenders, advocates of a system that "gets tough" on young criminals by meting out punishments based on offense characteristics (both present offense and past offense history) have become increasingly influential in recent years. In this article, I examine a special case, that of juvenile sex offenders in a Washington State county. for whom a 1990 law reintroduced treatment as a central goal. While Washington has been a forerunner in the shift toward a juvenile justice system in which offending behavior is the central factor in decision making, I argue that, largely as a result of this law, juvenile sex offending has been "medicalized" and that, in this process, distinctions based on offense characteristics have noticeably diminished. This case study provides both empirical support for established theoretical arguments regarding medicalization and a detailed explication of the differences between medical and legal assumptions about social problems.     

Juvenile justice sentencing: Do gender and child welfare involvement matter?

For young people who come into contact with the juvenile justice system, how they are sentenced following an arrest may profoundly influence the course of their development and adjustment as adults. Much of the research to date has focused on racial and ethnic disparities in juvenile justice sentencing policies and practices, and less is known about sentencing disparities based on other youth characteristics. Using Los Angeles County administrative data, this study investigates the effects of gender and child welfare statuses on sentencing for young people who are arrested for the first time (N = 5061). Results indicate that both young men and women are sentenced more harshly dependent upon the disposition, such that girls were more likely to be sentenced to group homes compared to boys, but boys were more likely to be sentenced to correctional facilities compared to girls. Child welfare-involved youth with a recent placement history are prone to more punitive sentences compared to their non-child welfare counterparts. Further, child welfare young women were not more likely to be sentenced to a harsher disposition compared to child welfare young men or non-child welfare young women. Implications for practice and future research are discussed.     

A life course model of education and alcohol use

Working from a life course perspective, this study examined the paradoxical association between academic status and drinking across the transition to young adulthood with multilevel modeling and a nationally representative sample of young people from the Add Health data project (n = 6,308). Taking academically advanced courses in high school was associated with lower rates of current drinking and binge drinking during high school (grades 9-12) but higher rates of both after high school (age range: 20-26). This positive longitudinal association between academic status and drinking was explained partly, but not completely, by educational, family, and work circumstances in young adulthood. The association was less likely to occur among students who attended high schools in which high achievement was the norm. Thus, the association between academic status and drinking behavior reverses across the transition to young adulthood, especially in certain types of peer environments within the educational system.     

韩国青少年校园暴力情况及相关政策

近年来,韩国校园暴力问题凸显,在家庭、学校及社会诸多方面因素的影响下,校园暴力事件呈现出逐年上升的趋势,对青少年身心健康及社会和谐发展造成了极其恶劣的影响。目前,韩国校园暴力的产生呈现出受害青少年心理创伤问题严重、小学高年级校园暴力的发生率极高及校园暴力类型多样化三大特点。为了预防及根治校园暴力,韩国历届政府相继制订并颁布了专项法律条例及各类应对举措。2014年,朴槿惠政府宣布实施"以学校现场为中心"校园暴力应对政策,主要内容包括在校园内开展丰富多样的校园暴力预防活动,根据暴力类型、发生地域以及学生年级的不同而推行有针对性的应对策略等。     

Evaluation of a School—Juvenile Court team approach to delinquency prevention

The School-Juvenile Court Liaison Project was designed to assist schools and courts in working cooperatively to intervene in and prevent delinquency. Results of the evaluation indicate increased communication and joint service planning between the systems. School and court personnel are talking to each other more often about students who are involved with the court, as well as about general issues of school-court cooperation, and school and court staff are working together more frequently to develop treatment plans for such students. School-court teams have also been successful in developing interagency case staffing councils and prevention-oriented projects in their communities. Factors contributing to the project's success are discussed.     

To educate or to incarcerate: Factors in disproportionality in school discipline

The school-to-prison pipeline describes the process by which school suspension/expulsion may push adolescents into the justice system disproportionately based on race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender. The current study moves the field forward by analyzing a survey of a diverse sample of 2539 students in 10th to 12th grade in Southern California to examine how demographic, individual, and family factors contribute to disparities in office referral and suspension/expulsion. African Americans, boys, and students whose parents had less education were more likely to be suspended/expelled. Higher levels of student academic preparation for class, hours spent on homework, and academic aspiration were associated with less school discipline. Findings suggest that helping students engage in school may be protective against disproportionate school discipline.     

Mixed results in a transitional planning program for alternative school students

Disciplinary alternative schools have a reputation as gateways to the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The authors conducted an evaluation of an intervention (Strategies for Success) designed to divert seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade alternative school students from this gateway. They used propensity score matching and a multivariate random effects model to estimate program impacts and found that the program not only increased attendance rates, at least in the short term, but also increased the likelihood of reassignment to alternative schools. The discussion focuses on possible reasons and solutions for high rates of return to alternative school and for the erosion of program effects.     

Contexts for Learning: Sociocultural Dynamics in Children's Development (Book)

We look across two studies, conducted within the current new managerialist policy context in Australia, which capture the construction of social spaces mediated through the nexus of material, activity, and discursive space. The focus of the first study is the negotiation of identities for a second language (Indonesian) teacher and his Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. The social space of their classroom is carnivalized, parodying traditional teacher/student relationships, and stripping the teacher of his authority. The students position the teacher as Other and, in the process, map the border of "white" space, temporarily allowing Aboriginal students access to dominant discourses. The second study documents strategies for reengaging young people who are not enrolled in mainstream schools. While policy makers have not articulated processes for reengagement, the default or implicit strategy of organizations that fund programs to reconnect young people in learning or earning pathways emphasizes information dissemination, or reengagement as contact. However, some youth workers are remaking the social space of school, enacting a strategy that prioritizes reengagement as commitment. These studies highlight the way processes of schooling dis/place both teachers and students. Our response is to consider ways of dis/placing school.     

Attitudes towards and the practice of discipline amongst parents of pre‐school children in Nottingham

This study investigates parents' attitudes towards the disciplining of young children, and compares their beliefs about discipline to their actual practice of behaviour management. Data have been collected from a sample of parents whose children are attending Nottinghamshire nursery schools using self‐report questionnaires. Only one quarter of respondents agree that smacking is the appropriate way to handle the unsafe behaviour of a three year old child, and many of the sample recognise that parents who smack their children may face repercussions from social services and the courts. However almost two thirds of the sample had smacked their pre‐school child in the past week. Parents who endorse the use of non‐coercive management techniques smack their children as well. These results suggest that initiatives to promote positive discipline may not be sufficient in themselves to reduce the physical punishment of children. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The practical potential of self-advocacy for improving safety outcomes for school-aged workers

Young workers are over-represented in workplace injury statistics and there is growing interest in addressing their vulnerability and safety exposure. Such concerns have been raised within a broader discursive framework of responsibilisation which has seen a transfer of responsibility for workplace safety from employer to worker. This article examines the potential for self-advocacy as a strategy for improving the safety of young workers through the provision of resources to articulate and act on workplace rights. The study utilises data derived from 48 group interviews involving 216 high school students (13–16 years of age) at 19 high schools in Queensland, Australia, who were asked to discuss their knowledge and experience of workplace rights and responsibilities. The limitations of the safety self-advocacy approach are explored, including the social, developmental and organisational issues that might affect the ability or willingness of school-aged workers to self-advocate. The findings reveal that the notion of self-advocacy is internalised by young people before they even enter the formal labour market but that in practice, attempts by young people to enact rights to safety are often dismissed or undermined.     

Youthful Offending and Delinquency: The Comorbid Impact of Maltreatment,Mental Health Problems,and Learning Disabilities

A majority of adolescents formally involved in juvenile court have at least one, if not more than one, significant emotional or learning impairment, or maltreatment experience. This is particularly true in juvenile detention and incarceration facility populations. While this problem is increasingly recognized within the juvenile justice system and social work profession, often the impact and correlation to delinquency of these child and youth difficulties is underestimated. This paper reviews the links from mental health disorders, learning (and academic-related) disabilities, and maltreatment victimizations to delinquent and serious youthful offending behaviors, and provides successful collaboration outcome examples to address this problem. The most difficult challenge to juvenile courts and youth-caring systems is working with adolescents and families with comorbid difficulties, for this group is most at risk for incarceration and involvement with the adult criminal justice system.