Explaining, interpreting, and prescribing: some tensions and dilemmas in the comparative analysis of youth justice cultures

This chapter reflects on the implications of a cross‐cultural empirical research study on youth justice in Italy and Wales for transnational prescription of good practice. It examines the challenges in doing comparative studies which isolate the influence of particular elements of criminal justice regimes. Such analysis may seem well suited to transnational policy prescription in that particular elements are more easily transposed than whole systems. But institutional categories and practice may be so culturally imbedded that it becomes very difficult to understand their influence outside those particular cultural contexts. The article goes on to examine the potential (and the limitations) for transnational policy prescription of more holistic interpretive approaches to explanation rooted in analysis of legal cultures. It concludes that such approaches can expand the range of possible policy choices in terms of transnational prescription but cannot offer a means to predict their precise effects

Truth-finding, procedural traditions and cultural trust in the Netherlands and England and Wales: when strengths become weaknesses

Criminal justice systems in different jurisdictions are based on different accounts as to how facts and truth are to be found. Because these accounts are often linked to procedural traditions they tend to draw normative weight from the past. Thus different criminal justice systems develop their own particular and critical points of trust where fundamental assumptions are made upon which the fact-finding capacity of the system is based. For jurisdictions from the inquisitorial tradition, trust is invested in the active truth-finding judge and the dossier. Thus in the Netherlands, the assumption is that thorough investigation led by an impartial prosecutor, the existence of a complete dossier and the active fact-finding role of the inquisitorial judge at trial preclude the necessity of strong defence rights and guarantee accurate truth-finding. Within the adversarial tradition in England and Wales, along with the jury and cross-examination at trial, the assumption is that, advance prosecution disclosure and independent active investigation by the defence provide a basis for strong defence narrative building and thus something like the equality of arms upon which accurate adversarial fact-finding is thought to depend. But what if the investigation in the Netherlands is neither thorough nor impartial, the dossier is incomplete and/or the judge unwilling to fulfil an active role? And what if the defence in England and Wales in fact lack the capacity or will either to conduct active independent pre-trial investigations or to make sense of the ‘unused materials’ disclosed by the prosecution? At this point, cultural trust in what are seen as systemic strengths can conceal points of weakness that not only render miscarriages of justice more likely but more difficult to identify and redress

Truth-finding and the adversarial tradition: the experience of the Cardiff Law School Innocence Project

Discusses the work of the Cardiff Law School Innocence Project (CLSIP) in reinvestigating allegations of wrongful conviction. Reviews the truth-finding vulnerabilities of the pre-trial process, whether police investigations are always examples of systematic searches for truth, and obstacles to defence lawyers' search for exculpatory materials. Details CLSIP's approach to evaluating investigations and responding to defence or disclosure failures

Learning from elsewhere: from cross-cultural explanations to transnational prescriptions in criminal justice. An introduction

International audienc

Socio-legal studies in France : beyond the Law Faculty

This article is the third in an occasional series dealing with the development, current status, and future of socio-legal studies in selected countries. It follows articles by Kim Economides (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and Harry Arthurs and Annie Bunting (Canada). In this article we argue that in France one can identify work that corresponds to the key strands of socio-legal research in Anglo-American societies but that ‘socio-legal’ as a category of research and scholarship does not have the presence it has in the United Kingdom. French law faculties continue to be strongly shaped by a traditional disciplinary orthodoxy rooted in a highly and distinctively structured form of doctrinal analysis. In the first part, we explain the relatively limited presence of socio-legal studies in French law faculties in terms of the historical and institutional mechanisms by which disciplinary closure has been created and maintained around traditional orthodoxies. But in the second part we will trace the presence – predominantly outside law faculties – of significant fragments of socio-legal practice in the scholarship of law and allied disciplines

Locating the ideal defendant : punishment, violence and legitimacy

This chapter outlines the central propositions of this book as a whole by drawing on its component chapters. In a nutshell, the book demonstrates that, within a variety of criminal justice systems, an implicit model of the ‘ideal defendant’ is at work. There is an expectation that defendants (by which we mean anyone proceeded against by the state) should display certain characteristics. This model of the ideal defendant is based on individual character, and on attitudes towards the state, the alleged offence and likely future offending. A key component of these norms is that defendants are expected to demonstrate a free and sincere acceptance of their personal responsibility for the offending. Ideally, this admission of responsibility should be so wholehearted that defendants can be seen as expressing ‘genuine’ remorse. While this is the ultimate ideal and defendants’ representations typically fall short of this, they are nonetheless encouraged to align themselves as closely as possible to that ideal. These expectations of defendants are brought home to them at all stages of their journey through the system not just by judges and prosecutors, but also by lawyers, probation officers and therapeutic professionals (eg psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers). Defendants are evaluated on the extent to which they perform in accordance with the ideal. This ‘grading’ of defendant emotion and its expression has consequences – whether negative or positive – for the subsequent state penal response to the defendant. In practice, encouragement and evaluation mesh so that expressions of remorse-like feelings and responsibility are constructed through interactions between defendant and criminal justice practitioners. This ‘making’ of remorse and responsibility is fraught with cultural misinterpretations and unrealistic expectations of particular defendants. Yet, the public acknowledgement by defendants of the legitimacy of their own punishment serves a latent function: it reassures practitioners that the routine coercion of their systemic practices does not represent injustice. It also enables the enactment of an apparent mutuality between state and citizen at a moment of rupture in that relationship

The association between anthropometric variables, functional movement screen scores and 100 m freestyle swimming performance in youth swimmers

This study examined the association between anthropometric variables, Functional Movement Screen (FMS) scores and 100 m freestyle swimming performance in early adolescent swimmers. Fifty competitive, national level, youth swimmers (21 males, 29 females, mean age ± SD = 13.5 ± 1.5 years, age range 11–16 years) performed an “all-out” 100 m freestyle (front crawl) swim as fast as they could in a 50 m pool. A median divide for 100 m timed swim was also used to divide the sample into faster or slower groups. Height, body mass, skinfolds and limb lengths were also assessed. Maturation was calculated by proxy using anthropometric measures and participants also undertook the FMS as a measure of functional performance. Backwards linear regression indicated a significant model (p = 0.0001, Adjusted R2 = 0.638) explaining 63.8% of the variance in swim performance with total sum of skinfolds, upper leg length, lower leg length, hand length and total height significantly contributing to the model. Swimmers who were classed as fast had lower total sum of skinfolds (p = 0.005) and higher total FMS score (p = 0.005) compared to their slower peers. In summary, this study indicates that anthropometric variables significantly explained the variance in 100 m freestyle swimming performance in youth swimmers