Parents’ Involvement in the Youth Justice System: Rhetoric and Reality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Youth Criminal Justice Act views parents as playing a critical role in both preventing and addressing youths’ criminal behaviour. However, the lack of specifically defined goals for parental involvement, in combination with potentially conflicting messages regarding parents’ roles, may result in confusion for parents, youth, and those who work in the system, confusion that may, in turn, reduce the efficacy of parents’ involvement. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with justice system officials (N = 41) who work with parents and young people, supplemented by direct courtroom observation of parents, we explored the reality behind the rhetoric of parental involvement. Results indicated that, despite the fact that parental involvement can have an important impact on legal outcomes for young people, and while there may be some improvement in parental involvement post-arrest under the YCJA, parents are often not involved in ways that are seen as effective and meaningful. Two kinds of conflict are seen as contributing significantly to the gap between policy and practice: interpersonal conflict between youth and their parents and conflict between the two roles that parents are expected to play – simultaneously socializing youth and promoting their legal interests in an adversarial system. Recommendations for addressing the barriers to effective parental involvement are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".