Parental Involvement in the Youth Criminal Justice System in Western Canada

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Summary of Context

In their article Doug Hillian and Marge Reitsma- Street examines parents’ involvement in the youth criminal justice system in Western Canada. Their study was conducting on ten Caucasian families nine of which were middle and upper middle class, with sons, involved in the Juvenile Criminal Justice System. The study was to determine the parents place in the judicial system, which appears to make it more arduous for parents, attempting to deal with the difficult task of parenting young offenders, while navigating a system, which labels, blames, and assumes that as parents they are unfit, irresponsible, and uncaring.

Hillian and Reitsma argues if one starts with the conceptual approaches to youth justice, parents are usually missing. When parents are added, there are different ideas about what can be expected of them, where they can fit, and what support there should be. However, in crime control approaches, there are high expectation of parents and punishments if they do not parent well and their children break laws.

Hillian and Reitsma examine every possible aspect of the issues, such as judicial systemic problems, probation officers, and other law official’s personal bias, and beliefs surrounding parental involvement. The apparent intrinsic argument of the judicial system, in addition to societal, is that parents can, should, and will care for and control their children, bringing them up to be law-abiding citizens. Hillian and Reitma attempted to demystify the assumption by examining the parent’s perspective of their experience with the judicial system, chronicling five apparent themes: Stress and loss, hard work, limited support, system constraints, and restricted parental participatio...

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...venile justice system, the community, and parents.

Some things, should to be immediately done, such as treating parents with empathy and respect, understanding that they have rights and should be informed of those rights. Some of the apparent rights of the parents are fair treatment with dignity and respect, the rights to know what the courts expects of them, and informed of all scheduled court dates and appointments, which could be inserted in a pamphlet. The overall benefit would be to work together in a collaborative effort to help reduce the recidivism rate among youth and lessen the inconvenient burden of the parents, community and juvenile justice system.

Hillian and Reitsma provided the framework with the information they that could be easily utilized and implemented, to bring about changes in the juvenile justice and how to work with parents.

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