Browse

In the wake of the civil rights movement, the legal system dramatically changed its response to discrimination based on race, gender, and other characteristics. It is now showing signs of yet another dramatic shift, as it moves from considering difference to focusing on neutrality. Rather than seeking to counter subjugation through special protections for groups that have been historically (and currently) disadvantaged, the Court now adopts a “colorblind” approach. Equality now means treating everyone the same way. This book explores these shifts and the research used to support civil rights claims, particularly relating to minority youths' rights to equal treatment. It integrates developmental theory with work on legal equality and discrimination, showing both how the legal system can benefit from new research on development and how the legal system itself can work to address invidious discrimination given its significant influence on adolescents—especially those who are racial minorities—at a key stage in their developmental life. The book articulates the need to address discrimination by recognizing and enlisting the law's inculcative powers in multiple sites subject to legal regulation, ranging from families, schools, health and justice systems to religious and community groups. The legal system may champion ideals of neutrality in the goals it sets itself for treating individuals, but it cannot remain neutral in the values it supports and imparts. The book shows that despite the shift to a focus on neutrality, the Court can and should effectively foster values supporting equality, especially among youth.

Although the United States has always been a nation of immigrants, the recent demographic shifts resulting in burgeoning young Latino and Asian populations have literally changed the face of the nation. This wave of massive immigration has led to a nationwide struggle with the need to become bicultural, a difficult and sometimes painful process of navigating between ethnic cultures. While some Latino adolescents become alienated and turn to antisocial behavior and substance use, others go on to excel in school, have successful careers, and build healthy families. Drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data ranging from surveys to extensive interviews with immigrant families, this book explores the individual psychology, family dynamics, and societal messages behind bicultural development and sheds light on the factors that lead to positive or negative consequences for immigrant youth. It illuminates how immigrant families, and American communities in general, become bicultural and use their bicultural skills to succeed in their new surroundings. The book concludes by offering a model for intervention with immigrant teens and their families which enhances their bicultural skills.

This book is a nontechnical, accessible, scholarly volume about criminal trajectories within a developmental context. The book provides a comprehensive overview of criminal trajectories as a concept and methodology. It addresses the complexities, controversies, findings, and applications from the rich criminal trajectory literature. It synthesizes material from the current literature in a range of fields, including developmental psychology, developmental and life-course criminology, quantitative methods, and crime prevention, to illustrate the theoretical, empirical, and practical utility of considering the heterogeneity underlying offender populations (i.e., of criminal trajectories) in the conceptualization, response to, and prevention of crime. Each chapter ends with suggested supplemental readings.

The American criminal justice system is based on the bedrock principles of fairness and justice for all. In striving to ensure that all criminal defendants are treated equally under the law, it endeavors to handle like-cases in like-fashion, adhering to the proposition that the same rules and procedures should be employed regardless of a defendant’s wealth or poverty, social status, race, ethnicity, or gender. Yet, exceptions have been recognized when special circumstances are perceived to have driven a defendant’s behavior or are likely to skew the defendant’s trial. Examples include the right to act in self-defense and to be appointed an attorney if you cannot afford one. Another set of exceptions, but ones that are much more controversial, poorly articulated, and inconsistently applied, involves criminal defendants with a mental disorder. Some of these individuals are perceived to be less culpable, as well as less capable of exercising the rights all defendants retain within the justice system, more in need of mental health services than criminal prosecution, and warranting enhanced protections at trial. As a result, special rules and procedures have evolved over the centuries, often without fanfare and even today with little systematic examination, to be applied to cases involving defendants with a mental disorder. This book offers that systematic examination. It identifies the various stages of criminal justice proceedings when the mental status of a criminal defendant may be relevant, associated legal and policy issues, the history and evolution of these issues, how they are currently resolved, and how forensic mental health assessments are conducted and employed during criminal proceedings.

Workplace crimes are never far from the news. From major scandals like Enron to violent crimes committed by co-workers to petty theft of office supplies, deviant and criminal behavior is common in the workplace. Psychological factors are almost always involved when an employee engages in such behavior. This book offers insights at the level of the individual employee and also sheds light on the role organizations themselves may play in fostering such criminal behavior. It considers psychological factors involved in theft and fraud, workplace violence, employee discrimination, and sexual harassment. It also analyzes a number of variables which can influence such behavior; including employee personality, employee emotional processes, experience of occupational stress, organizational culture, organizational injustice, and human resource management practices. The book will be of core interest to those interested in the psychology and sociology of work, organizational behavior, and human resource management.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, the solution to mental illness seemed to be found. It lay in biological solutions, focusing on mental illness as a problem of the brain, to be managed or improved through drugs. We entered the “Prozac Age” and believed we had moved far beyond the time of frontal lobotomies to an age of good and successful mental healthcare. Biological psychiatry had triumphed. Except maybe it hadn't. Starting with surprising evidence from the World Health Organization that suggests that people recover better from mental illness in a developing country than in the first world, this book asks the question: how good are our mental healthcare services, really? It picks apart the science that underlies our current psychiatric practice, and puts the patient back at the heart of treatment for mental illness, making the case that a good relationship between patients and their doctors is the most important indicator of whether someone will recover. Arguing passionately for a future of mental health treatment that focuses as much on patients as individuals as on the brain itself, this is a book set to redefine our understanding of the treatment of madness in the twenty-first century.

Don’t Use Your Words! argues that the discourse of “emotional management” across educational, therapeutic, and media sites aimed at young children valorizes the naming of certain (accepted) emotions in the interest of containing affective expressions that don’t conform to the normative notion of growing up. A therapeutic discourse has become prevalent in media produced for children in the U.S.—organizing storylines to help them name and manage their feelings, a process that weakens the intensity and range of those feelings, especially their expression through the body. Both through the appropriation of these media texts and the production of their own culture, kids resist these emotional categorizations, creating an “archive of feeling” that this book documents. Taking a cultural studies approach, the book analyzes a variety of cultural productions by kids between the ages of five and nine: drawings by Central American refugee children; letters and pictures by kids in response to the Trump victory; observations of a Montessori classroom; tweets from a Syrian child; Tumblr fanart; kids’ television reviews from Common Sense Media; dozens of YouTube videos; and observations of kids playing the popular games Minecraft and Roblox. I show how kids talk to each other across these media by referencing memes, songs, and movements, constructing a common vernacular that departs from normative conceptions of growing up. This book asks: what does it feel like to be a kid? And why do so many policy makers, parents, and pedagogues treat feelings as something to be managed and translated?

When gay couples become parents, they face a host of questions and issues that their straight counterparts may never have to consider. How important is it for each partner to have a biological tie to their child? How will they become parents: will they pursue surrogacy, or will they adopt? Will both partners legally be able to adopt their child? Will they have to hide their relationship to speed up the adoption process? Will one partner be the primary breadwinner? And how will their lives change, now that the presence of a child has made their relationship visible to the rest of the world? This book examines the ways in which gay fathers approach and negotiate parenthood when they adopt. Drawing on empirical data from in-depth interviews with seventy gay men, the book analyzes how gay dads interact with competing ideals of fatherhood and masculinity, alternately pioneering and accommodating heteronormative “parenthood culture”.

Few afflictions are as frightening or as heartbreaking as mental illness. We have come a long way over the past few decades in our understanding of mental illness and its potential treatments. Yet, tragically, many across the country who struggle with serious mental illness are unable to find effective, quality medical treatment. As a federal commission on mental health concluded, the system of care is in shambles. But why? And how do we fix it? This book exposes the weaknesses in the current system, examining how and why one of the world's richest and most advanced countries has allowed its most vulnerable citizens to be victimized by the very system designed to help them. The book argues that the patchwork of care traditionally employed for mental health treatment is simply not up to the task, and that what we need is profound, fundamental, and system-wide change in mental health services. The book then goes on to provide an easy-to-follow road map for achieving lasting transformation, centered on five recommendations for creating a truly effective mental health system of care that enables patients to achieve a lasting recovery. Mental illness is not going to just go away, but the book prescribes a comprehensive plan to make treatment accessible and effective so that those who suffer can rejoin their families and their communities. It shows how a transformed system of community-based care allows those with serious mental illness to finally be able to go home.

When Nancy was in her late twenties, she began having blinding headaches, tunnel vision, and dizziness, which led to the discovery of an abnormality on her brain stem. Complications during surgery caused serious brain damage, resulting in partial paralysis of the left side of her body and memory and cognitive problems. Although she was constantly evaluated by her doctors, Nancy's own questions and her distress got little attention in the hospital. Later, despite excellent job performance post-injury, her physical impairments were regarded as an embarrassment to the “perfect” and “beautiful” corporate image of her employer. Many conversations about brain injury are deficit-focused: those with disabilities are typically spoken about by others, as being a problem about which something must be done. This book takes a new approach, offering narratives which highlight those with brain injury as agents of recovery and change in their own lives. The book draws on in-depth interviews with ten women with acquired brain injuries to offer an evocative, multi-voiced account of the women's strategies for resisting marginalization and of their process of making sense of new relationships to self, to family and friends, to work, and to community. Bridging psychology, disability studies, and medical sociology, the book showcases how—and on what terms—the women come to re-author identity, community, and meaning post-injury.

This book offers an in-depth step-by-step guide to the use of semi-structured interviews in qualitative research. By tracing the life of an actual research project—an exploration of a school district's effort over 40 years to address racial equality—as a consistent example threaded across the book, it shows how readers can approach the planning and execution of their own new research endeavor, and illuminates unexpected real-life challenges they may confront and how to address them. The book offers a close look at the inductive nature of qualitative research, the use of researcher reflexivity, and the systematic and iterative steps involved in data collection, analysis, and interpretation. It offers guidance on how to develop an interview protocol, including the arrangement of questions and ways to evoke analytically rich data.

Adolescents are infamous for their rebellious behavior. Indeed, much of the focus of therapy and clinical intervention with troubled adolescents focuses on their presumed need to rebel against their parents as they define their own identities. Yet this book argues that approaching work with adolescent clients with this presumption in mind is likely to miss the roots of their problem behavior. Rather than acting out against parental authority, adolescents in need of clinical help are most often dealing with their disappointing comparisons with their peers—the most relevant others to them during this period of their development. The book explains that it is countless interactions with their peers, at school and elsewhere outside of the home, that are the primary mode of psychological and social development for adolescents. Practitioners must recognize this crucial influence, and perhaps forgo traditional approaches, in order to better work with their adolescent clients. The books is a practical professional guide for how to approach and aid troubled teens by accessing the wealth of insight to be gained from understanding the influence of peer interactions on development and on behavior. Full of diagnostic categories and protocols for use with all types of adolescents, as well as guidance, tips, case studies, and offering a targeted model for adolescent group therapy, it provides professionals with all the tools they need to assist teens on their road to adulthood.

Over the past two decades, concern about adolescent sex offenders has grown at an astonishing pace, garnering heated coverage in the media and providing fodder for television shows like Law and Order. Americans' reaction to such stories has prompted the unquestioned application to adolescents of harsh legal and clinical intervention strategies designed for serious adult offenders, with little attention being paid to the psychological maturity of the offender. Many strategies being used today to deal with juvenile sex offenders—and even to define what criteria to use in defining “juvenile sex offender”—do not have empirical support and, this book cautions, may be doing more harm to children and society than good. The book critiques the current system and its methods for treating and categorizing juveniles, and calls for a major reevaluation of how these cases should be managed in the future. Through an analysis of the history of the problem and an empirical review of the literature, including specific cases and their outcomes, it demonstrates that current practices are based more on our collective fears and moral passions than on any supportive science or sound policy.

Trials are supposed to be not only fair and accurate but also efficient. Evidence law is meant to facilitate trials, and, at the same time, to encourage and protect important societal values and relationships. In pursuit of these goals, those who create the rules (i.e., common-law judges and modern drafting committees) must engage in amateur applied psychology. Their task requires them to employ what they think they know about the ability and motivations of witnesses to perceive, store, and retrieve information; about the effects of the litigation process on testimony and other evidence; and about people's capacity to comprehend and evaluate evidence. These are the same phenomena studied by cognitive psychology and social psychology. Further, psychology examines the role of emotion, credibility, expert influence, and other relevant topics. The rules of evidence restrain lawyers from using the most robust weapons of influence, and direct judges to exclude certain categories of information, limit it, or instruct juries on how to think about it. The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law draws on the best current psychological research to identify and evaluate the choices implicit in the rules of evidence, and suggest alternatives that psychology reveals as more likely to accomplish the law’s goals. This interdisciplinary book is aimed at lawyers, judges, researchers, and students, and seeks to provide all with a better understanding of the psychology of what is perhaps the most psychologically connected of legal subjects.

This is a book about the psychology of environmental law. Psychology can affect environmental legal doctrine and institutions by affecting how people perceive, respond to, value, and make decisions about the environment. Where environmental law fails to incorporate insights from psychology, it risks misunderstanding and mispredicting human behaviors that injure and affect the environment, and misprescribing legal tools to shape those behaviors. Yet there is no robust tradition of psychological analysis within environmental law. This book is intended to help change that, by sparking and supporting discussion about how psychology can inform, explain, and improve how environmental law operates. It begins by identifying what is distinctively psychological about environmental law, arguing that many of the characteristics that make environmental injury distinctive also implicate distinctive psychological phenomena, and understanding those phenomena can help in crafting, enforcing, and understanding the impact of laws that seek to manage environmental injury. In particular, it suggests that the distinctively diffuse, complex, and nonhuman character of environmental injury has psychological as well as legal implications. The book then explores the payoff of applying a psychological analysis to environmental law, exploring the policy, practical, and doctrinal implications of psychology in pollution control, ecosystem management, and climate change law and policy.

The Psychology of Property Law considers how research in psychology offers new perspectives on property rules and doctrines, and suggests avenues of reform. The book explains how assumptions about human judgment, decision making, and behavior have shaped different property laws and examines to what extent these assumptions are supported by the research. Employing key findings from psychology, the book considers whether property law’s goals and justifications for various property doctrines could be achieved more successfully with different rules. In addition, the book highlights property laws and conflicts that offer productive areas for further behaviorally informed research. The book critically addresses several topics from property law for which psychology has a great deal to contribute. These include ownership and possession, legal protections for residential and personal property, takings of property by the state, redistribution through property law, real estate transactions, and discrimination in housing and land use. Turning to remedies, the book discusses how psychology can inform legal debates over the desirability of property rules versus liability rules, and in-kind remedies versus monetary ones.

Tort law regulates most human activities: from driving a car to using consumer products to providing or receiving medical care. Injuries caused by dog bites, slips and falls, fender benders, bridge collapses, adverse reactions to a medication, bar fights, oil spills, and more all implicate the law of torts. The rules and procedures by which tort cases are resolved engage deeply-held intuitions about justice, causation, intentionality, and the obligations that we owe to one another. Tort rules and procedures also generate significant controversy—most visibly in political debates over tort reform. The Psychology of Tort Law explores tort law through the lens of psychological science. Drawing on a wealth of psychological research and their own experiences teaching and researching tort law, Jennifer K. Robbennolt and Valerie P. Hans examine the psychological assumptions that underlie doctrinal rules and tort law practice. They explore how tort law influences the behavior and decision-making of potential plaintiffs and defendants, examining how doctors and patients, drivers, manufacturers and purchasers of products, property owners, and others make decisions against the backdrop of tort law. They show how the judges and jurors who decide tort claims are influenced by psychological phenomena in deciding cases. And they reveal how plaintiffs, defendants, and their attorneys resolve tort disputes in the shadow of tort law. Robbennolt and Hans here shed fascinating light on the tort system, and on the psychological dynamics which undergird its functioning.

The last two decades have seen tremendous growth in biological research on psychopathy, a mental disorder distinguished by traits including a lack of empathy or emotional response, egocentricity, impulsivity, and stimulation seeking. But how does a psychopath's brain work? What makes a psychopath? This book provides a concise, non-technical overview of the research in the areas of genetics, hormones, brain imaging, neuropsychology, environmental influences, and more, focusing on explaining what we currently know about the biological foundations for this disorder and offering insights into prediction, intervention, and prevention. It also offers a nuanced discussion of the ethical and legal implications associated with biological research on psychopathy. How much of this disorder is biologically based? Should offenders with psychopathic traits be punished for their crimes if we can show that biological factors contribute? The text clearly assesses the conclusions that can and cannot be drawn from existing biological research, and highlights the pressing considerations this research demands.

This book presents a compelling study of how ordinary people commit extraordinary acts of violence and how perpetrators and victims manage in the aftermath. Grounded in extensive, qualitative analysis of perpetrator testimony, the book reveals the individual experiences of perpetrators as well as general patterns of influence that lead to collective violence. Drawing on public testimony from the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the book interweaves hundreds of hours of testimony from seventy-four violent perpetrators in apartheid South Africa, including twelve major cases that involved direct interactions between victims and perpetrators. The analysis of perpetrator testimony covers all tiers on the hierarchy of organized violence, from executives who translated political doctrine into general strategies, to managers who translated these general strategies into specific plans, to the staff—the foot soldiers—who carried out the destructive plans of these managers. The book transcends the particulars of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to reveal broader themes and unexpected insights about perpetrators of collective violence, the confrontations between victims and perpetrators in the aftermath of this violence, the reality of multiple truths, the complexities of reconciliation, and lessons of restorative justice.

In low-income U.S. cities, street fights between teenage girls are common. These fights take place at school, on street corners, or in parks, when one girl provokes another to the point that she must either “step up” or be labeled a “punk.” Typically, when girls engage in violence that is not strictly self-defense, they are labeled “delinquent,” their actions taken as a sign of emotional pathology. However, this book demonstrates that in poor urban areas this kind of street fighting is seen as a normal part of girlhood and a necessary way to earn respect among peers, as well as a way for girls to attain a sense of mastery and self-esteem in a social setting where legal opportunities for achievement are not otherwise easily available. The author of this book spent almost two years in west and northeast Philadelphia to get a sense of how teenage girls experience inflicting physical harm and the meanings they assign to it. While most existing work on girls' violence deals exclusively with gangs, the book sheds new light on the everyday street fighting of urban girls, arguing that different cultural standards associated with race and class influence the relationship that girls have to physical aggression.