Children and youth become involved with the juvenile justice system at a significant rate. While some children move just as quickly out of the system and go on to live productive lives as adults, other children become enmeshed in the system, developing deeper problems and/or transferring into the adult criminal justice system. Justice for Kids is a volume of work by leading academics and activists that focuses on ways to intervene at the earliest possible point to rehabilitate and redirectoto keep kids out of the systemorather than to punish and drive kids deeper. Justice for Kids presents a compelling argument for rethinking and restructuring the juvenile justice system as we know it. This unique collection explores the system's fault lines with respect to all children, and focuses in particular on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation that skew the system. Most importantly, it provides specific program initiatives that offer alternatives to our thinking about prevention and deterrence, with an ultimate focus on keeping kids out of the system altogether.

Presumption of Guilt analyses criminal prosecutions that spawned the notorious “kids for cash” scandal. Although a juvenile judge freely admitted committing fraud in failing to properly account for millions of dollars, prosecutors insisted he had accepted that money in exchange for jailing juveniles. These heinous allegations were presumed to be true, resulting in widespread hysteria. Incredibly, after creating the scandal, prosecutors failed to produce evidence it had ever happened at the judge’s trial. Unfortunately for the judge, by that time “kids for cash” was so ingrained in the public’s conscience that the lack of its proof was meaningless.

Child-friendly Justice assesses how the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child has affected the development of child law and the promotion of children’s rights in the past twenty-five years. Its 24 studies probe a broad variety of issues relating to children’ s contact with civil, administrative and criminal justice systems, the protection of child integrity and their right to participation, information and proper representation. The contributors - all experts on child-related matters - represent international organisations, academia and NGOs. They provide a clear picture of the origins of the current problems in realising child-friendly justice, and they discuss possible solutions.

St. Mary County is a small rural midwestern enclave with a unique approach to handling accusations of child sexual abuse. Hoping to spare children the trauma of lengthy court appearances and probing interrogations, St. Mary's professionals strive to obtain confessions from accused sex offenders rather than ask the victim to bear the burden of proof. Treating this county as a critical case study, scholars from a variety of fields come together to analyze this community's unique approach. They address relevant case law, innovative treatments for both victim and offender, and the social history of child sexual abuse as a national policy concern. They cover legal burdens and scientific methods, prosecutors and protocol, the interrogation of victims and suspects, the use of expert witnesses, defense strategies, and practice wisdom in videotaping. In addition, they examine the unfolding drama of a single legal case from incidence to conviction. The result is a fascinating dialogue that confronts the unique complexities of child sexual abuse for readers on all sides of the issue. Introducing a model that makes enormous headway in the pursuit of justice, fairness, and trauma treatment, this interdisciplinary text is an indispensible tool for all communities seeking redress.

This book is an ethnographic examination of the young people who serve voluntarily as judges, advocates and other court personnel at the Red Hook Youth Court (RHYC) in Brooklyn, New York—a juvenile diversion program designed to prevent the formal processing of juvenile offenders—usually first-time offenders—for low-level offenses (such as fare evasion, truancy, vandalism) within the juvenile justice system. Focusing on the nine-to-ten-week long unpaid training program that the young people undergo prior to becoming RHYC members, this book offers a detailed description of young people’s experiences learning about crime, delinquency, justice, and law. Combining moments of self-reflection and autobiographical elements into largely "uncooked" fieldnotes, the book seeks to demonstrate the hegemonic operations of a court (the Red Hook Community Justice Center (RHCJC)—a multi-jurisdictional problem-solving court and community center where the RHYC is housed), the processes in which it secures belief in formal justice and the rule of law, ensures consent to be governed, and reproduces existing social structures. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, law, sociology, and youth justice, as well as to those undertaking ethnographic research on young people, crime and justice.

Examines just how the important goals of educating for democracy can be achieved from the perspective of those working in teacher education and in P-12 schools.

Distributed to depository libraries in microfiche.