The Impact of Sentencing and Other Judicial Decisions on the Children of Parents in Conflict with the Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The situation of children whose parents are involved in adult criminal proceedings is emerging as a pressing public policy concern. There is a growing body of empirical evidence recognizing the adverse effects for dependent children both as direct and indirect victims of their parents’ criminal behaviour and in relation to criminal justice decisions about their parents, especially when a court is remanding or sentencing a parent who is a primary or sole caregiver to custody. At the same time, the empirical research shows that both formal and informal support and interventions can mitigate the negative effects of such an adverse experience on children, especially when activated early in the criminal justice decision-making process. In this report, we highlight the growing influence of an evolving international legal standard establishing a yet to be fully defined requirement for criminal courts to systematically recognize and consider the best interests of a child when sentencing a parent or a legal guardian as a specific and independent legal consideration in order to mitigate foreseeable and avoidable harms to the child. We also examine how selected, mainly common law, countries, including Canada, are interpreting and applying this standard in their domestic policy and laws and review someof the innovative child and family focused criminal justice practices that are being adopted in various jurisdictions. Finally, we briefly discuss the implications of these various developments for sentencing reform in Canada and point to some opportunities for Canadian legal and institutional reforms to move forward on this important child and family rights issue.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.004 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
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".