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PUBLIC CONFIDENCE IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE IN CANADA:  A COMPARATIVE AND CONTEXTUAL ANALYSIS
 
Julian V. Roberts
Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa and
Centre of Criminology, Oxford University
 
Public confidence in criminal justice has emerged as an important issue in most western nations.  Several jurisdictions have made promoting public confidence a policy priority, and governments in many countries have recently conducted public opinion surveys to gauge levels of confidence in criminal justice.  However, little is known about levels of public confidence in criminal justice in Canada.  This article reviews the empirical research on this issue and attempts to explain current trends.  Although a significant plurality of the public expresses little confidence in the justice system, more people are positive than are negative.  In comparison to other countries, confidence levels in criminal justice are generally higher in Canada.  This said, the public has less confidence in the justice system than in other public institutions such as the health care system.  Consistent with findings elsewhere, the police attract most, and the prison system the least amount of public confidence.  The article places these findings in context, and discusses their implications for research and policy.
 

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HOMICIDE AND MEDICAL SCIENCE:  IS THERE A RELATIONSHIP?
 
Martin A. Andresen
School of Criminology
Simon Fraser University
 
Violent crime remains high in the United States and Canada.  Some have hypothesized that there is a disparity between the trend of the rate of aggravated assault (as well as violent crime, in general), on the one hand, and the trend of the rate of homicide, on the other, and that this disparity can be explained by decreases in trauma mortality rates.  This hypothesis is supported through the "lethality approach" that measures the proportion of actual deaths (homicides) relative to potential deaths (homicides and aggravated assaults) in criminal activity.  The present article shows that the lethality approach is sensitive to data definitions and that there is no disparity between the trends of the rates of aggravated assault and of homicide.
 

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LE MINEUR SUJET DE DROIT ET LA JUSTICE PÉNALE : DU « MEILLEUR INTÉRÊT » À L’ALIÉNATION
 
Martin Dufresne, Richard Maclure et Kathryn Campbell
Université d’Ottawa

The recognition of the rights of young offenders under criminal law is a recent development and can be traced to the emergence of the Young Offenders Act of 1982, as part of the larger neo-liberal movement in Canadian youth justice policy.  Through an analysis of the transformation of the rights of youths, in conjunction with several focus groups undertaken with young offenders, the authors discuss the emergence of youth as a subject, rather than an object, of rights.  The ability of the young person to exercise the power that accompanies those rights appears to be limited by the arbitrary bureaucracy of the criminal justice process and by successive amendments to the law.  In effect, while a youth’s right to be heard is firmly entrenched in statute, the confusing and overwhelming nature of the court experience serves to alienate many youth and forces them to feel that they are, in effect, objects of the system, rather than autonomous subjects.  Thus, in spite of neo-liberal discourses regarding the changing nature of the role of youth in criminal law, youth are in fact hardly liberated from the paternalism of the system, but rather continue to be held hostage by its limitations.  Although under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, in theory, youth continue to be a "subject" of rights, in practice, the exercise of those rights is impeded by the constraints of the new law and expansion of extra-judicial measures.
 

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PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT IN YOUTH COURT
 
Kimberly N. Varma
Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology
Ryerson University
 
Parental involvement has been a cornerstone of Canadian youth justice legislation and has been given greater importance under the Youth Criminal Justice Act (2003).  Given the importance of parental involvement, one would expect that parental attendance and participation in court hearings would have some influence on the outcome of youth court cases.  This study explores parental involvement in youth court proceedings at bail and sentencing hearings.  The findings suggest that the majority of parents attended court hearings, and the courts heard that many parents were involved in their child’s life, but that this information did not relate to the outcome of the hearing, except in relation to supervision and living arrangements at bail hearings.  There is also a suggestion from the qualitative comments made at hearings that judicial decision makers did take into account parental support in determining the outcome of a case, but the number of cases where parental support was discussed in court was insignificant.  The importance of these findings will be discussed in relation to the expanded scope of the parental role under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
 

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ECOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF CRIME RATES AND POLICE DISCRETION WITH YOUNG PERSONS:  A REPLICATION
 
Jennifer L. Schulenberg
Sam Houston State University
 
Joanna C. Jacob
University of Waterloo
 
Peter J. Carrington
University of Waterloo
 
This research note replicates previous research published in the Journal (Schulenberg 2003) using data from 374 municipal jurisdictions in 2001 to analyse the relationship between municipal crime rates and the police use of charging apprehended youth as an indicator of formal social control.  This analysis also extends the earlier research by including additional indicators of social disorganization and of criminal opportunity.  The results are largely consistent with those of the earlier research:  support only for social disorganization theory as an explanation of municipal crime rates; support for urbanization and social disorganization theories as explanations of the police use of formal social control with youth; and no support for criminal opportunity theory as an explanation of either phenomenon.  The only substantial difference with the results of Schulenberg (2003) is the support found by the present research for the overload hypothesis as an explanation of the police use of formal social control with youth.
 
 

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