Youth courts, also known as teen courts & peer courts, are one of the fastest growing programs in the community justice movement. This Guide will equip juvenile justice agencies with baseline info. that will aid them in developing, implementing, & enhancing teen courts programs. Chapters: overview; organizing the community; legal issues; developing a program purpose, goals, & objectives; determining a target population & designing a referral process; designing program services; developing a program model & procedures; recruiting, using, & training volunteers; examining human & financial resource issues; & program evaluation.
Peer mentoring is an increasingly popular criminal justice intervention in custodial and community settings. Peer mentors are community members, often with lived experiences of criminal justice, who work or volunteer to help people in rehabilitative settings. Despite the growth of peer mentoring internationally, remarkably little research has been done in this field. This book offers the first in-depth analysis of peer mentoring in criminal justice. Drawing upon a rigorous ethnographic study of multiple community organisations in England, it identifies key features of criminal justice peer mentoring. Findings result from interviews with people delivering and using services and observations of practice. Peer Mentoring in Criminal Justice reveals a diverse practice, which can involve one-to-one sessions, group work or more informal leisure activities. Despite diversity, five dominant themes are uncovered. These include Identity, which is deployed to inspire change and elevate knowledge based on lived experiences; Agency, or a sense of self-direction, which emerges through dialogue between peers; Values or core conditions, including caring, listening and taking small steps; Change, which can be a terrifying and difficult struggle, yet can be mediated by mentors; and Power, which is at play within mentoring relationships and within the organisations, contexts and ideologies that surround peer mentoring. Peer mentoring offers mentors a practical opportunity to develop confidence, skills and hope for the future, whilst offering inspiration, care, empathy and practical support to others. Written in a clear and direct style this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about the social effects of peer mentoring.
Steve Peers examines the institutions of justice and home affairs policy formulation and implementation within the EU. The author discusses the ways in which these institutions have intervened in cases of crime, corruption and immigration.
Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.
To aid the progress of peer support care, Peer Support Work highlights the experiences of contributors who work or study social care and have lived experience with mental health, substance use, homelessness, criminal justice, and migration.
The book serves as a guide for all clinicians seeking to improve healthcare outcomes by implementing peer support in the treatment and management of medical and mental health conditions. The book begins with a chapter that describes the importance of peers and how peers are increasingly being utilized to improve medical outcomes. Each chapter opens with an introductory section, include tables and figures, and ends with a summary section for quick reference. Written by experts in the field, this resource covers the clinical implications for peer support in substance misuse, chronic medical conditions, in special populations, and mental illness generally. Each chapter is designed specifically to be accessible for a broad clinical audience of experts and non-experts across medical specialties. Peer Support in Medicine is an excellent resource for all clinicians seeking to improve healthcare outcomes using the gains made by the peer support model, including psychiatrists, psychologists, healthcare researchers, and medical students across specialties, nurses, social workers, and all others.
