The Justice System and the Family: Police, Courts, and Incarceration: Volume 20

Although the family plays a key role in affecting offender behavior, little research examines how sanctioning contexts affect familial relationships. Using data from the Australian reintegrative shaming experiments (RISE), we investigate how the processing of offenders via court and conference affects their bonds with family members by examining the type of shaming – reintegrative or disintegrative – they experience. In contrast to disintegrative or stigmatizing shaming, which tends to be associated with court processing, reintegrative shaming shames the act and not the moral character of the offender, allowing for the reparation of social ties. We find that despite higher levels of stigmatization in conferences, this form of processing is also more reintegrative and strengthens family relationships to a greater extent than courts, with offenders feeling prouder of being a member of their family and indicating that familial closeness and respect increased. Moreover, reintegrative but not disintegrative shaming mediates the relationship between criminal justice processing and family relationships.

Greater parental monitoring is commonly associated with reduced delinquent behavior in adolescents, yet less is known about the extent to which parental monitoring behavior changes after a child is arrested for the first time. The present study examines the extent to which mothers’ monitoring behaviors (i.e., parental monitoring knowledge and effort) change in association with juvenile recidivism after their sons’ first arrest, operationalized through both youth-reported recidivism and official re-arrest records. Mother–son dyads (total N = 634) across three states were interviewed in two waves over 30 months following the youth’s first arrest. Mothers who reported both more monitoring knowledge and effort at Wave 1 had sons who self-reported less recidivism and were less likely to be re-arrested at Wave 2. Repeated sons’ re-arrests were associated with a change in mothers’ monitoring behavior, as both parental knowledge and parental effort significantly increased from Wave 1 to Wave 2 when youth have been re-arrested more than once, relative to youth who had never been re-arrested. No change in monitoring behaviors were observed in association with youth-reported recidivism, and mothers who stated an intention to change their monitoring habits at Wave 1 did not necessarily do so by Wave 2. The findings point to the ability of parents to modulate their monitoring behavior to respond to chronic juvenile offending. This provide an opportunity for practitioners to work with parents to improve their monitoring skills, to ensure rehabilitative gains that result from justice system intervention are maintained in the home via parental monitoring.

Various family problems have been identified as risk factors for juvenile delinquency. While providing training on skills (e.g., interpersonal relationship skills) to tackle these family problems, delinquency-prevention programs often overlook the fact that these training components fall under the umbrella of home economics education (HEE). Moreover, they often fail to see the relevance of the entire range of HEE (ranging from cooking, handyman work skills, financial management, to child development and interpersonal relationship skills) in reducing family problems. There is also a scarcity of research examining the relationship between HEE and these family problems.

To fill this void, this study explores the relationships between HEE and three key familial problems – conflict in marital/romantic relationships, ineffective parenting behavior, and family financial conditions. This study utilized data collected from a sample of adults (N = 280) with college or graduate education. Data were analyzed using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models available in SPSS 26. F tests were used to evaluate the fitness of models.

The results show that HEE is significantly and positively associated with respondents’ use of negotiation in solving conflict in marital/romantic relationships. It also has a marginally significant and positive association with family financial conditions. Specifically, HEE on financial management is significantly and positively associated with family financial conditions. The author concludes that the role of HEE in reducing family problems deserves more research attention.

The definition of the term “family” around the Western world is more heterogeneous than ever before and so are its roles and the social expectations of it. However, prisoners’ families (specifically parents and siblings) are expected to support their incarcerated son/brother as they are perceived responsible for his choices and as having the closest relationship with him. Based on a study of parents and siblings of incarcerated men in Israel, this chapter’s goal is to shed light on families’ choice to support their incarcerated son or brother and the struggles this choice entails. A thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with 17 parents and 10 siblings of incarcerated men in Israel showed that nuclear family members may experience various struggles throughout the legal proceedings, including family hardships, negative social experiences, and negative experiences with formal institutions – all leading to social self-exclusion. Looking through the intersectionality lens, the findings show that when accumulating hardships that prisoners’ families experience encounter perceived harsh institutional systems of oppression, preordained marginalization can be deepened as families operate in opposition.

Over 2 million individuals are incarcerated in the US criminal justice system. More than half of incarcerated Americans are also parents of minors. Parental incarceration can lead to a higher risk of mental illness and enduring trauma in children, as well as other problematic cognitive, developmental, and educational outcomes. Examining parental incarceration through a racial equity lens is critical, as people of color make up 67% of the incarcerated population despite making up only 37% of the US population. Further, gender-related equity issues pose important challenges for families with incarcerated parents. Here, we discuss prison-based psychosocial interventions designed both to build parenting skills and to improve parent well-being within a racial and gender equity lens. We hypothesize that effective services in these areas are essential components in a broad strategy designed to mitigate the potential negative effects suffered by families and children of incarcerated parents of color as a result of their imprisonment.

This chapter illuminates the central role of kin networks and the routines they construct to maintain family ties and support young fathers in jail. Recent research demonstrates variation in incarcerated fathers’ contact with children. There is less focus on variation in contact with extended kin networks and how kin networks contribute to father–child contact during an incarceration period. Forty-three incarcerated young fathers (ages 19–26) in three Southern California jails, 79% of whom self-identified as Latino, were interviewed to explore fathers’ descriptions of family contact during jail. Incarcerated young fathers rely on kin networks to coordinate routines for contact during jail, including father–child contact. Father inclusion in family life during jail depends not only on the mother of the child but – perhaps integrally – extended paternal kin. Available paternal kin can facilitate connectedness between children and incarcerated fathers in family contexts of complicated parental circumstances (e.g., parental relationship dissolution). Family members mitigate family challenges to maintain ties despite carceral policies meant to isolate fathers from families and children. A continued focus on kin networks and their role in maintaining family connectedness is crucial to understanding and reducing the collateral consequences to family members and incarcerated persons following release from jail.

Intergenerational confinement is an under-recognized, policy-driven issue which greatly impacts Indigenous and racialized peoples in countries with ongoing colonial legacies. Numerous policy solutions enacted over colonial history have exacerbated instead of mitigated this situation. This chapter advances an improved understanding of the impacts of carceral legacies, moving beyond the dominant focus of parental incarceration in the literature. Focusing on Indigenous peoples, multiple generations in families and communities have been subjected to changing methods of confinement and removal. Using critical policy analysis and interview research, this chapter interrogates these intergenerational impacts of carceral policy-making in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 124 people in the three case countries, this chapter centers perspectives of people who have been intergenerationally confined in carceral institutions. With a goal of transformation, it then explores an alternative orientation to policy-making that seeks to acknowledge, account for, and address the harmful direct and indirect ripple-effects of carceral strategies over generations.

For contemporary American young adults (aged 18–29), coresidence with parents is now the most common living arrangement. Recent research on residential transitions out of and back into the parental home shows that residential independence is still common, meaning that many young adults coreside with parents after first leaving the nest. The timing of residential independence and subsequent coresidence is often tied to other life-course outcomes, such as relationships and employment, as well as characteristics of the family context, such as family structure and financial resources. A small body of research also demonstrates that residential transitions are common following criminal justice contact experiences such as arrests and periods of incarceration. While this association does not appear to be explained by the family context, the current study argues there are several reasons to anticipate heterogeneity in coresidence patterns based on the childhood family context. Drawing on data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I find that criminal justice contact is associated with coresidence with parents during young adulthood in a fairly consistent manner across different dimensions of family context (although parental education may play a role). These findings demonstrate the power of the criminal justice system in directing or redirecting residential trajectories and have implications for both individuals with contact and their families.

The victim’s rights movement and restorative justice (RJ) have gained momentum around the world. More laws and policies have focused on crime victims and their families. Western literature suggests that the victim’s family suffers physical, emotional, and financial tolls and that the power of the victim’s family in pursuing justice for their loved ones remains limited. This is particularly concerning within the political and legal context of the abolitionist movement, innocence project, and human rights groups’ campaigns against police torture. Grounded in the perspectives of RJ and Chinese legal culture, this study examines the victim’s family, represented by Ding and senior Yu, of the Nian Bin capital murder case. Drawing on published reports and using the thematic content analysis method, this study examines the following aspects of victim’s family in a death penalty case: 1) victim family’s physical, emotional, and financial tolls; 2) victims’ family and the criminal justice system; 3) victims’ family and the media; and 4) the relationship between the victims’ and the accused’s families. This study concludes with discussions of the competing goals of families impacted by a crime and RJ practices that would help mitigate the loss of the victim’s family and enhance their confidence in the criminal justice system.

Domestic abuse presents significant challenges for legal systems around the world. In England and Wales, victims of domestic abuse sometimes find that they are pulled in different directions by multiple legal interventions in the criminal, civil, and family justice spheres. This is often due to inadequate information and evidence sharing but also inconsistent approaches and court orders. The “Harm Panel” report published in 2020 examined the approach of the family justice system in child arrangement cases involving allegations of domestic abuse. It found “silo working” was one of four structural barriers contributing to unsafe processes and outcomes. The Harm Panel provided renewed impetus for a policy to introduce integrated domestic abuse courts (IDACs) to address the problems of fragmented legal responses. There has previously been one unsuccessful attempt to introduce an IDAC in England Wales. This chapter will explore what went wrong and whether the evidence base for IDACs in other countries supports another attempt.

The Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence against Women and Domestic Violence was adopted by the Council of Europe and opened for signature in Istanbul in 2011 (the Istanbul Convention). The Istanbul Convention offers a treaty-level protection against domestic violence to all people, including LGBTQs, that is, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer persons. Intimate partner violence (IPV) occurs in same-sex relationships as well as different-sex relationships. In addition, LGBTQ persons face the risk of violence in homophobic and transphobic family environments. The Istanbul Convention has faced significant backlash, a process driven by the global anti-feminist movement that also calls for the protection of traditional family values. In the Convention, “gender” is described as “the socially constructed roles, behaviours, activities and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for women and men” (Article 3(c)). The opponents of the Convention suggest that gender roles are not “given” by the society but inherent in different natures of women and men. The dissatisfaction of many States, such as Bulgaria, Armenia, Ukraine, and so on, is related to the perceived excessiveness of rights given to LGBTQ persons in the Istanbul Convention. This research paper sets aside the issue of political campaigning against the Convention in Eastern Europe, which has already been well reported. Instead, it aims to reveal how the protection against domestic violence under the Convention raises normative, conceptual, and substantive challenges in States entrenching the ideology of traditional family values in law.

This chapter juxtaposes human trafficking of children by their families with structural disadvantage characterizing cycles of violence to suggest that carceral approaches alone cannot break trajectories of crime. It highlights contexts where familial violence is culturally normalized and where the victim–offender binary is challenged. The devadasi system in a district in the Northern region of the State of Karnataka, India, and stories of women and communities in urban India provide a context for the discussion. This chapter posits the need to explore community corrections, restorative and transitional justice, and social justice in criminal justice administration to build safe families and communities for children.