Juvenile Delinquency in a Diverse Society, Second Edition presents students with a fresh, critical examination of juvenile delinquency in the context of real communities and social policies—integrating many social factors that shape juvenile delinquency and its control, including race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Authors Kristin A. Bates and Richelle S. Swan use true stories and contemporary examples to link theories of delinquency not just to current public policies, but to existing community programs—encouraging readers to consider how theories of delinquency can be used to create new policies and programs in their own communities. Readers will gain a foundational understanding of the social diversity that contextualizes varying experiences and behavior of juvenile delinquency, as well as a deeper appreciation for the policies, social justice, and community programs that make up the juvenile system.

The first special juvenile court was created in 1899. Since then,juvenile justice has had a chequered history, and is now more controversial than ever. Should our treatment of young offenders differ in its aims or principles from that of adult offenders? What role should ideas of punishment or retribution play? Should our aims be rehabilitative and educative rather than punitive? Should we divert young offenders from the criminal justice system altogether, opting for 'restorative' rather than 'retributive' justice? These questions are addressed in this inter-disciplinary volume, which brings together criminologists, educationalists, psychologists and philosophers. Part I traces the history of juvenile justice, identifying patterns, and signs of what the future might hold. Part II tackles fundamental normative issues of punishment, moral education and restoration, with particular emphasis on the role of communication. Part III attends to the role that such emotions as shame and guilt should play in juvenile justice, paying particular, and critical, attention to Braithwaite's conception of reintegrative shaming.

This title was first published in 2002: Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950 provides a critical synthesis of the growing body of work on the history of British and European juvenile delinquency. It is unique in that it analyzes definitions of and responses to, disorderly youth across time (from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries) and across space (covering developments across Western Europe). This comparative approach allows it to show how certain themes dominated European discourses of delinquency across this period, not least panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness and future social stability. It also shows how these various threats were countered by recurring strategies, most notably by repeated attempts to deter delinquency, to divide responsibility between the state, civil society and the family, and to find a "proper" balance between moral reform and physical punishment, between care and control.

I am not sure when a series of volumes becomes an "institution"; this is the fourth annual volume of Critical Issues in American Psychiatry and the Law, and each has been an extraordinary summary of important forensic topics. This book makes the point that the interface of psychiatry and law is not merely a legal one, but has a great deal to do with clinical issues such as diagnosis and treatment. Children and adolescents are not adults. This may come as something of a shock to those who proselytize for equal rights for children, and to those adults (including some psychiatrists, attorneys, and judges) who advocate giving the child adult choices and/or responsibilities. Children differ from adults in many ways. The specialist in child or adoles cent psychiatry knows not only that one must attend to special social and family issues for juveniles, but that juveniles are more complex internally as well. They attempt to survive in the world while rapidly growing and learning, usually with physically and emotionally immature resources. They have had few years in which to develop experience, and do not have the psyche with which to integrate that experience in ways one would expect of a mature adult. Sometimes this frightens the patient, as in the case of a physically large teen ager whose impulse control is impaired. Sometimes it is frustrating, as in the case of a healthy child unable to escape from a dysfunctioning family. It is always confusing, and usually uncomfortable.

In the first study of its kind Mary McAleese subjects to comprehensive scrutiny the Roman Catholic Church’s 1983 Code of Canon law as it applies to children. The Catholic Church is the world’s largest non-governmental organisation involved in the provision of education and care services to children. It has over three hundred million child members world-wide the vast majority of whom became Church members when they were baptised as infants. Canon law sets out their rights and obligations as members. Children also have rights which are set out in the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child to which the Holy See is State Party. The impact of the Convention on Canon Law is examined in detail and the analysis charts a distinct and worrying sea-change in the attitude of the Holy See to its obligations under the Convention since the clerical sex abuse scandals became a subject of discussion at the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors implementation of the Convention. Mary McAleese wins Europe’s richest theology prize for her study of canon law. The former President of Ireland Mary McAleese has won one of the Catholic world’s most prestigious prizes, the Alfons Auer Ethics Award, from Tübingen University in Germany for her doctoral thesis on Children’s Rights and Obligations in Canon Law.

Hundreds of thousands of the inmates who populate the nation's jails and prison systems today are identified as mentally ill. Many experts point to the deinstitutionalization of mental hospitals in the 1960s, which led to more patients living on their own, as the reason for this high rate of incarceration. But this explanation does not justify why our society has chosen to treat these people with punitive measures. In Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness, Patricia E. Erickson and Steven K. Erickson explore how societal beliefs about free will and moral responsibility have shaped current policies and they identify the differences among the goals, ethos, and actions of the legal and health care systems. Drawing on high-profile cases, the authors provide a critical analysis of topics, including legal standards for competency, insanity versus mental illness, sex offenders, psychologically disturbed juveniles, the injury and death rates of mentally ill prisoners due to the inappropriate use of force, the high level of suicide, and the release of mentally ill individuals from jails and prisons who have received little or no treatment.