Juvenile Detention Center Effects on Futures of At-Risk Youth by Jennifer L. Turner MS, Walden University, 2014 BS, University of Maryland University College, 2011 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Forensic Psychology Walden University August 2019 Many juvenile offenders return to the justice system after serving their incarceration sentences. Detaining youth has a negative impact on their mental health, education, employment, and ability to secede from a criminogenic life course. Identifying detention center effects on youths' futures can provide further insight on why the current approach does not successfully deter youth from secondary delinquency. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore future effects on incarcerated youth. A qualitative research design using a phenomenological paradigm was used to investigate study constructs. Labeling and social learning theories served as theoretical frameworks. Labeling theory was used to describe impact on youth after they receive a label of juvenile delinquent. Conceptualization on learned criminal behaviors in incarceration environments was made using social learning theory. Data was collected from personnel directly involved with juvenile incarceration, release, and rehabilitation. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were used for data collection. Coding software, bracketing, and concept mapping were implemented for data analysis. Detention centers attribute to a decrease in abilities required for youth to become functioning society members. Implications for social change include enhancing knowledge for professionals working to rehabilitate juveniles in effort to increases ability for future success. Participants specifically noted a lack of collaboration and understanding on how to implement evidenced-based practices into juvenile offender rehabilitation. Collaboration between the JJS, detention center staff, parents, and community programs is necessary to address this social problem.

The Industrial Schools Act introduced State coercion into the ‘childcare’ of the colony, and industrial schools became legal enforcers for other welfare institutions. This thesis provides an account of two industrial schools in nineteenth and early twentieth century New South Wales, focusing on the children and the lives they lived within the institutions and relying heavily upon primary sources. NSS Vernon enrolled destitute, neglected and delinquent boys. The curriculum, combined with an elaborate system of rewards, proved effective as reformative agents and after 1911 the ship’s coercive function was taken over by other reformatory schools and by a system of probation. About one third of girls admitted to ISG Newcastle were older, sexually delinquent girls. Inappropriate site, inadequate preparation, insufficient and untrained staff, lack of suitable curriculum and denial of support from the Colonial Secretary led to total failure of the school. Physical and verbal abuse was in evidence at Newcastle and resurfaced after the change of enrollments to mostly older girls about the time of the school’s transfer to Parramatta in 1887. After 1905 committals were aimed at maintaining street order and parental authority, to house the ‘uncontrollables’ and ‘incompetents’ and to provide a lock hospital for the control of venereal disease. The expressed purpose of the school to provide ‘good useful women’ dovetailed neatly with the introduction of probation, mostly for boys, which was enforced ‘through the mother’ / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This research utilised a range of deterministic and stochastic analyses to establish whether Queensland's juvenile justice system processes Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders differently. The impetus for this research stemmed from the continued high rates of Aboriginal over-representation within Australia's criminal justice system, despite diversionary measures to reduce such over-representation, and a commitment by the Queensland Government to reduce by 50% the number of Aboriginal peoples in custody by the year 2011. There are two competing hypotheses concerning the cause of this over-representation, (i) external factors such as socioeconomic disadvantage, unemployment or substance abuse, or (ii) systemic disparity within the criminal justice system. For this research, disparity is defined as the unacceptable use of discrimination; discrimination can be appropriate if it is used to define or enhance a situation, such as discriminating between offenders who are recidivists and those who are first time offenders. The inappropriate use of discrimination occurs for example, when harsher sentences are issued to offenders based on non-legal factors such as race or gender. Systemic disparity is therefore used here to represent the inappropriate use of discrimination against an offender by the criminal justice system. The second hypothesis, one of systemic disparity, provided the framework for this research, which posed the following primary question: Is there quantifiable evidence to support the existence of disparity acting against young male Aboriginal offenders within Queensland's juvenile justice system? Two separate but complementary studies were designed to address this issue: the pathways study and the trajectory study. The pathways study utilised 20,648 finalised appearances for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders in Queensland's juvenile courts, during 1999 to 2003. Three custodial decision-making stages (police custody, remand, and sentencing) were examined and two questions initially posed: Does the custodial decision made at one stage of the juvenile justice system impact on a subsequent custodial decision-making stage? Does criminal history, Aboriginal status, offence type or an interaction of these factors significantly influence the probability of (i) detention in police custody (ii) court remand (iii) a custodial order at sentencing? It was recognised that other legally relevant factors such as family structure and stability, school attendance and community ties might also influence these custodial decisions; however, for the purposes of this research it was not possible to include these variables in the analyses. Controlling for criminal history, findings from logistic regression analyses indicated that being detained in police custody increased the odds of being remanded into custody, and being remanded into custody increased the odds of a custodial order. Whilst Aboriginal status was not a consistent factor at any of these three custodial stages, there was clear evidence of disparity acting against the young male Aboriginal offender, particularly early in their criminal career. To examine these disparities further, these three custodial stages were modeled as eight processing pathways: four of which resulted in a custodial order and four in a noncustodial order. Using this processing model, a third question was posed: Do young Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal male offenders have different custodial pathways? Findings indicated that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders were in general, processed along similar custodial pathways that did not include police custody, remand or a custodial order. However, young male Aboriginal offenders were less likely than equivalent non-Aboriginal offenders to have been processed along this pathway and more likely to be processed along the pathways that included remand. It was found that young offenders with a chronic criminal history were more likely to be processed along these remand pathways, and Aboriginal offenders were more likely to have a chronic criminal history than non-Aboriginal offenders; there was clear evidence of disparity at specific custodial stages of the system. In addition, as young male Aboriginal offenders progressed deeper into the system there was evidence of cumulative disparity, particularly along the remand pathways, meaning that the probability of being in custody increases as the offender progresses from one custodial stage to the next custodial stage. Given the existence of disparity, acting within the juvenile justice system and against the young male Aboriginal offender, it was important to formulate viable solutions to such disparity, particularly in light of the Queensland government's commitment to reduce Aboriginal offenders in custody by 50%. Deterministic analyses and computer simulations were used to test the viability of various reduction scenarios suggested by the data. Despite in some instances, different results from the deterministic analyses and the computer simulations, overall findings indicated that to reduce custodial disparity whether at the remand stage, the custodial order stage, or in custody overall (the summation of police custody, remand and custodial orders) that reducing remand, regardless of whether the young offender had been in police custody or not, was the best overall solution. The trajectory study built on the findings of the pathways study, which had identified criminal history as an important factor in the processing pathways of young male Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal offenders. Using the semi-parametric group based method, the criminal trajectories of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders in Queensland were modeled. These trajectories were based on the finalised appearances of two cohorts of young offenders aged 10 to 17 years of age: those born in 1983 and 1984 and who had turned 18 years of age in 2001 and 2002 respectively. All of these young male offenders had entered the adult system when they turned 17 years of age, and this data provided their complete juvenile history in Queensland. Prior analyses using this method had not considered Aboriginal status or race as a determining factor in these trajectory models, nor had these models been validated either internally or externally in published works. For this research, internal validity was considered as the correct classification of offenders into trajectory groups, and external validity as the ability to reproduce these results in a second or subsequent sample of juvenile offenders. Two questions were therefore posed in the trajectory study: Do young Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal male offenders have different criminal trajectories? Can the predicted model(s) be validated, both internally and externally? Initial findings indicated that the optimal trajectory models selected on prior knowledge and the Bayesian Information Criterion did not validate internally. This finding brought into question the trajectory results of other published works that had not internally validated their models. The models finally selected as optimal indicated that Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young male offenders did not have a common criminal trajectory and could not be modeled as one population. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal young offenders were modeled by a low-frequency group, a late-onset group, and a chronic trajectory group. However, the young male Aboriginal offender was more likely than the non-Aboriginal to have been in the chronic or the late onset group and less likely to have been in the lowfrequency group. External validation utilised an innovative but simple method that utilised all of the data in the modeling process along with a sample of this same data for validation purposes: 10% of the criminal profiles, which were characteristic of the trajectory groups, and a further 5% of randomly selected profiles were chosen for validation. All of the characteristic profiles, but only 50% of the randomly selected profiles were validated, and of the latter, the majority not validated was in the late-onset group. In total, 79.2% of the Aboriginal trajectories and 85.6% of the non-Aboriginal criminal trajectories were correctly externally validated. Overall, there are two important implications from this research for government. First, even though young male Aboriginal offenders are more likely to have a chronic criminal history than non-Aboriginal offenders, this factor does not account for all of the observed disparity acting against the young Aboriginal offender within Queensland's juvenile justice system: there is evidence of disparity within the system that is unaccounted for by either offence type or criminal history. Second, given this chronic criminal history, systemic solutions to systemic disparity whilst viable, will not ultimately resolve this problem: they are only short-term measures at the end of a very long justice system. Longer-term solutions are needed to address external factors such as socio-economic disadvantage, unemployment and substance abuse in Aboriginal communities, before these young people are exposed to the system. Continuing to concentrate on systemic solutions, to such an entrenched problem as Aboriginal overrepresentation and disparity, is a misdirection of system resources and is inconsistent with social justice.

This research thesis investigates news journalists?? role in the promotion and protection of peace and human rights. I explore how news journalists do not just have the ability, through the discursive selections they make, to be a catalyst for peace and non-violent solutions, it is their obligation under international human rights. My study links arguments about universal ethics for media based on international human rights with the practical and analytical approach of ??peace journalism??. The main argument rests on the idea that objectivity or impartiality in news journalism does not equal ethical neutrality since there is always a discursive selection made by the news journalists. In order to monitor whether news journalists discursive selections comply with the international human rights obligations, I have explored how the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC) report A Last Resort? were covered in three Australian newspapers when it was published in 2004. The HREOC report was a testament of human rights abuses by the Australian Federal Governments towards children in Australian detention centres. I establish that health professionals were a significant group for both HREOC??s main findings and recommendations and a key group for the contextualisation of the human rights violations explored and exposed in the HREOC report. Informed by conflict analysis and peace studies theories I argue HREOC establish how the detention policy equals ??structural violence?? that caused ??direct violence??, which was justified and normalised because ??cultural violence??. I use discourse analysis to explore the discursive selections in the newspapers, and establish that the report received limited coverage and health professionals were omitted in the news while the political conflict was reported. This trivialised the report and health professionals?? role, which led to the naturalisation and normalisation of the violence. I finally reinforce these finding by exploring alternatives to the coverage using a peace journalism framework, which further clarifies the subjective nature of the discursive selection.

<p>The purpose of this study is to look into how detained swedish juveniles, in the ages between 15 an 20, experience time in custody. The primary questions are; To what exctent do juveniles understand their situation? To what exctent can juveniles handle their situation? Do the juveniles find meaning in their situation and if so, what aspects of the detention is considered meaningful? The study is based on seven qualitative interviews with young men detained at a youth custody ward at Kronobergshäktet in Stockholm. The theory used to analyze the interview results is Antonovskys theory of sence of coherence (SOC). A salient feature in the young mens experiences was that all of them had the ability to regard some of the aspects of the detention as meaningful. These positive aspects includes time for reflection and a possibility to break destructive patterns. Further more, it was evident that most of the respondents experienced that their lives contained elements of importance, such as family, education and future goals. Nevertheless, isolation, lack of contact with family and friends, powerlessness and worries about the future, were aspects of the detention that had a negative influence on all of the respondents in variyng degrees.</p>

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 212-232).

The purpose of this study is to look into how detained swedish juveniles, in the ages between 15 an 20, experience time in custody. The primary questions are; To what exctent do juveniles understand their situation? To what exctent can juveniles handle their situation? Do the juveniles find meaning in their situation and if so, what aspects of the detention is considered meaningful? The study is based on seven qualitative interviews with young men detained at a youth custody ward at Kronobergshäktet in Stockholm. The theory used to analyze the interview results is Antonovskys theory of sence of coherence (SOC). A salient feature in the young mens experiences was that all of them had the ability to regard some of the aspects of the detention as meaningful. These positive aspects includes time for reflection and a possibility to break destructive patterns. Further more, it was evident that most of the respondents experienced that their lives contained elements of importance, such as family, education and future goals. Nevertheless, isolation, lack of contact with family and friends, powerlessness and worries about the future, were aspects of the detention that had a negative influence on all of the respondents in variyng degrees.

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Understanding how nutrient input into coastal wetlands influences aquatic vegetation and the fate of anthropogenic nutrient inputs can help improve water quality management plans. The goals of this study were to (1) compare nutrient concentrations in various storage compartments downstream from two point nutrient sources (a sewage treatment plant outfall and a residential detention basin) in Armand Bayou, a coastal brackish wetland in the Galveston Bay (Texas, USA) watershed, and (2) determine if nutrient storage in those compartments helped improve water quality downstream. Water column nutrients can be assimilated by aquatic vegetation, adsorbed to sediment, or diluted within the system as distance from source input increases. To determine the fate of nutrients to Armand Bayou, I measured nutrient concentrations in the sediment, water column, pore water, and tissue of exotic and restored native plants downstream from a sewage treatment plant and a residential detention basin. To assess nutrient removal potential of a common exotic species, I determined relative growth and nutrient uptake rates of Eichhornia crassipes. Water column total nitrogen, NH₄⁺ and NO₃ˉ concentrations decreased by 95, 96 and 99 percent downstream from the sewage outfall (~2200 m distance). Water column NH₄⁺ and NO₂ˉ concentrations decreased by 93 and 75 percent downstream from the detention basin (~2500 m distance). Exotic species Alternanthera philoxeroides, Pistia stratiotes and E. crassipes showed higher aboveground/emergent tissue nutrient content than restored, native Schoenoplectus californicus for both tributaries. Schoenoplectus californicus had the largest biomass although appeared to be limited in its ability to remove nitrogen from the water column. Nutrient uptake rates by E. crassipes were low and did not change with increasing distance from nutrient source, but high relative growth rates in both tributaries suggest the nuisance potential of this exotic species. Low sediment and pore water nutrient concentrations for both tributaries suggest these compartments are not sinks. All plant species did not respond to changes in water column nutrient concentrations with increasing distance from source input suggesting dilution to be the main factor in water column nutrient decline for both tributaries. This study will provide water quality resource managers guidance on the development of total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) for water bodies impaired by high nutrient loading and the implementation of wetland plants efficient in nutrient removal for water quality improvement.

The main argument of this thesis is that the penitentiary crisis in Venezuela is brought about an inept criminal justice system whose functioning (or lack thereof) further exacerbates overcrowding in penitentiary facilities as well as violates the most basic human rights. More elaborately, I argue that the unintentional (mis)use of pre-trial preventive detention, one of the consequences of the inept criminal justice system, further exacerbates the overcrowding in prisons and creates serious human rights implications. The purpose of this study is to establish a connection between the penitentiary crisis in Venezuela, with a focus on pre-trial preventive detention, and the larger criminal justice system failure in the country. The data source and data gathering technique for the thesis consists of a content analysis and a secondary literature review. Since the theoretical framework of the project is international human rights, instruments from the United Nations and the Organization of American States are used. Reports from non-governmental organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones provide the data to conduct the analysis which is specific to pre-trial preventive detention in Venezuela. These reports are produced on a yearly basis and will help to compliment the data obtained from government sources, mainly the Venezuelan Ombudsman's office. The findings of the thesis support the argument that contrary to common belief, the (mis)use of pre-trial preventive detention in Venezuela is in fact mainly accidental, it is not systematic in the sense that it is not targeting a particular group of people due to their political affiliation and/or beliefs. Furthermore, I prove that Venezuelan penitentiary facilities are overcrowded due to the (mis)use of pre-trial preventive detention. Immediate recommendations for the Venezuelan state include re-categorizing the penal population in Venezuela as well as diminishing the use of deprivation of liberty, specifically pre-trial preventive detention.