Youth gangs are a pervasive problem of contemporary society. Since the first recorded work on this topic in Canada more than 70 years ago, many theoretical and empirical research studies have been added to this field of inquiry and efforts continue with the goal of better understanding and responding to this social issue. Over the past 20 years, research into desistance from gang involvement has gained popularity and, while we are gaining a better grasp of the area, additional work is needed to examine the processes associated with leaving gangs among justice-involved youth in the Canadian context. Drawing from focus groups and individual interviews with 30 justice-involved youth and 23 youth justice practitioners in the city of Ottawa, this doctoral dissertation sought to explore the subjective understandings and experiences of justice-involved youth with gang affiliations. Given the focus on the youth justice system, there was also interest in how the perspectives of justice-involved youth aligned with those of youth justice practitioners. The way in which these two groups define and attribute meaning to issues related to gang involvement and desistance and their views on the role of the youth justice system in supporting the latter should be taken into consideration in the development of future strategies to address youth gangs. The knowledge and insights gained through the findings from this research project can be used to inform policy and practice to prevent gang involvement among at-risk youth, to intervene with gang members, and to support desistance by helping motivated individuals to pursue alternatives to gang life. The recommendations provided in this doctoral dissertation contribute to the overall body of empirical research on youth gangs and highlight potential areas of future investigation for innovation and change on how we understand and address this social issue.

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No abstract available / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Mercantile Law / unrestricted

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Traditionally offending women are framed through essentialist discourses of pathologisation and the family. Hence, good women are constructed as passive, compliant, vulnerable to victimisation, and nurturers. Offending women are constructed within criminal justice processes as disordered, physiologically and psychologically flawed. Censure or sympathy dispensed to women within the system is contingent on a number of key factors: the type of offence, the category of women involved, and the way in which women interact and negotiate the discourses used to construct their aberrance. The focus of this thesis is offending women and how they are socially constructed through legal and penal discourses within the court and the prison. However this thesis rejects the essentialist framework which positions women as passive recipients of an omnipotent patriarchal criminal justice system and thus having no agency. Nor is this thesis about creating a new entity to encompass all offending women. Instead an anti- essentialist approach is adopted that allows the body, power, and women's agency to be theorised. This approach provides a more complex and detailed account of women's aberrance that acknowledges the diverse range of women, their experiences and negotiations of criminal justice processes. The combination of real women's lived experiences and an alternative theoretical framework provides a very different perspective in which to understand female offending.

The purpose of this report is to focus on the school-to-prison pipeline and the need to intervene with school discipline that pushes students out of the classroom and into the criminal justice system. It showcases services and programs in Austin, Texas, including Southwest Keys, Webb Youth Court, and Council on At-Risk Youth as examples for solutions. The report also incorporates research and expert advice on the safety and wellbeing of students while advocating a need to change the policies and culture surrounding schools. / text

This thesis examines the history of the Greater Dallas Crime Commission and its effectiveness within the criminal justice system. It is a private agency established fifty (50) years ago to monitor and investigate the criminal justice system. Today, it serves as a source of funding for criminal justice agencies, provides awards and recognition forums for law enforcement and lobbies for legal revisions of the criminal code. The research is designed to examine their role within the criminal justice system. Whether current crime theories are supported by the commission is central to the thesis. There are no prior studies available of crime commissions perhaps because they are privately funded and operated by civilians. Crime commissions do exert influence, politically and financially, upon law enforcement. It is reflected often in their history. The extent of this effect is the subject of the paper. To this end, the commission's role in changing state laws, providing funds for police training, recognizing prosecutors and paying awards to informants lends credibility to their role in the criminal justice system. Their function has often changed during the fifty-year history. If there is a deficit, it may be that the commission has the capability, through its sphere of influence, of encouraging civilian actions that may conflict with law enforcement policy. Some examples of these are included in the study.

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Technology: Public Management (Peacebuilding), Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2015. / One of the major issues following the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was what to do with the huge number of people (around 100 000) accused of crimes during the genocide. Western legal approaches dealt with a handful of such cases at huge expense but the vast majority of the accused languished in prison. The government decided to employ a modified version of Gacaca - the traditional way of dealing with disputes and lower level crimes at community level. Using a qualitative research methodology and employing focus groups and individual interviews as data collection tools, this research investigate perceptions about the operation of Gacaca in three Rwandan communities, with particular reference to truth, justice, forgiveness and reconciliation. The research suggests that in the three communities, Gacaca was seen as bringing the truth out into the open and to provide a measure of justice, although limitations were noted in both of these respects. Given the enormity of the genocide crimes, however, there seemed to be little progress in the areas of forgiveness and reconciliation. / M

This thesis seeks to explore how two governmental documents discuss earlier preventions of criminality. The two documents analyzed are the Female Offender Strategy and The Government’s Approach to Crime Prevention. The first of these documents main aim is to provide a more gender sensitive approach to the criminal justice system within the United Kingdom and the latter document does not explicitly differ between the genders. The analysis will be carried out with the use of feminist pathways theory and through an intersectional lens, in order to demonstrate how the two documents discuss earlier prevention of criminality. By utilizing the methodology of What’s the Problem Represented to be (WPR) the aim is to demonstrate who benefits from the documents and who is relegated to the sidelines. Neither of the two documents demonstrate a strategy or policy which takes into account the many varying identities which exist amongst the inmate population of the criminal justice system.