Young offender diversion in Canada: tensions and contradictions of social policy appropriation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Under Canada’s Young Offenders Act (YOA, 1984–2003), the concept of diversion became an important feature of the youth justice system. Consisting of the formally constituted Alternative Measures program and other more informally administered procedures, diversion was developed as a means of responding to youth aged 12–17 years who have committed minor offences while minimizing their risks of stigmatization and recidivism. Although the YOA was subjected to persistent criticism concerning its ambiguity and contradictions, and was recently replaced by the new Youth Justice Criminal Act, very little research has been devoted to the implementation of young offender diversion programs. In this paper we present the results of a phenomenological inquiry into the practice of diversion in one large southern Ontario community. By regarding the implementation of diversion as a form of social policy appropriation by various professional groups, we highlight the perspectives of 17 practitioners who have had extensive experience in administering particular aspects of diversion programs. These perspectives differ in some fundamental ways, and thus help to illuminate the broad latitude that exists for discretionary decision-making in sanctioning youth who have committed minor offences. Such differences also reflect the variation of diversion practices and corresponding tensions among those responsible for this form of young offender disposition. The paper concludes by surmising that a two-tiered system of diversion is emerging that inadvertently may be diminishing the rights of minor young offenders.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it