Take Home Message: Parents of juveniles may steadily disengage from the juvenile court process when their expectations of the system’s fairness or efficacy are not met.
Full report: L. Pennington (2015). “A Case Study Approach to Procedural Justice: Parents’ Views in Two Juvenile Delinquency Courts in the United States.” British Journal of Criminology, 55 (5), pp. 901-920. The author is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Worcester State University in Worcester, MA.
Link: http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/5/901.abstract. If you have trouble accessing the report Andy Davies may be able to help.
Sample: 2 case studies of parents of children in an unidentified juvenile court in the North-East.
The Details: Pennington examines two case studies of parents with children in juvenile court. Through in-depth interviews with those parents and others throughout the legal process, she documents the ways in which parents’ early hopes – that the court and law enforcement will act as their ally in the socialization and punishment of their child – are disappointed. The legal process does not meet their expectations when it fails to consider facts they consider relevant, when court actors (including the child’s attorney) fail to listen to them, and services they deem necessary and helpful for their child are not forthcoming. Finally both parents realize the court won’t assist in their ‘socializing goals’ (p.912) for their child and personally disengage from the process altogether.
A considerable body of ‘procedural justice’ work suggests that where participants in the legal process believe that process was ‘legitimate’, the more likely they are to comply with its mandates. Pennington is skeptical and suggests that while compliance with the law may occur, this may have as much to do with the disempowering impact of interaction with legal processes as it has to do with seeing that process as ‘legitimate’. The parents in her study, in fact, end the process with a much more cynical view of the justice process. While acknowledging that lawyers may have good reasons to exclude parents from representation of child clients, Pennington suggests the ‘absence of opportunities to participate meaningfully in the legal process may be a major barrier to [sharing] the values and purpose’ of the justice system (p. 916).
Responding to this ILS review of her work, Dr. Pennington wrote the following:
Full report: L. Pennington (2015). “A Case Study Approach to Procedural Justice: Parents’ Views in Two Juvenile Delinquency Courts in the United States.” British Journal of Criminology, 55 (5), pp. 901-920. The author is Assistant Professor of Criminal Justice at Worcester State University in Worcester, MA.
Link: http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/55/5/901.abstract. If you have trouble accessing the report Andy Davies may be able to help.
Sample: 2 case studies of parents of children in an unidentified juvenile court in the North-East.
The Details: Pennington examines two case studies of parents with children in juvenile court. Through in-depth interviews with those parents and others throughout the legal process, she documents the ways in which parents’ early hopes – that the court and law enforcement will act as their ally in the socialization and punishment of their child – are disappointed. The legal process does not meet their expectations when it fails to consider facts they consider relevant, when court actors (including the child’s attorney) fail to listen to them, and services they deem necessary and helpful for their child are not forthcoming. Finally both parents realize the court won’t assist in their ‘socializing goals’ (p.912) for their child and personally disengage from the process altogether.
A considerable body of ‘procedural justice’ work suggests that where participants in the legal process believe that process was ‘legitimate’, the more likely they are to comply with its mandates. Pennington is skeptical and suggests that while compliance with the law may occur, this may have as much to do with the disempowering impact of interaction with legal processes as it has to do with seeing that process as ‘legitimate’. The parents in her study, in fact, end the process with a much more cynical view of the justice process. While acknowledging that lawyers may have good reasons to exclude parents from representation of child clients, Pennington suggests the ‘absence of opportunities to participate meaningfully in the legal process may be a major barrier to [sharing] the values and purpose’ of the justice system (p. 916).
Responding to this ILS review of her work, Dr. Pennington wrote the following:
Another finding that may be of interest to defense attorneys is that defense attorneys' conversations with youth and parents about the fairness of the system appear to greatly affect their clients' and family members' views. Often, defense attorneys in this research view their job as navigating an unfair system to obtain the best outcome for their client. These attorneys do not believe that the criminal justice system is fair and legitimate and they communicate their negative perceptions of judges, prosecutors, and police officers to their clients and their clients’ families. While the article illustrates how parents leave the court process with more negative views in part because of their inability to work with and influence the defense attorney, we know little about how defense attorneys transmit their views of the court system's injustice to their clients and their family members.
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