Adesão ao valor justiça em crianças e adolescentes

This search is part of a larger study conducted at the Carlos Chagas Foundation (SP-Brazil), which aims to build a scale to assess adhesion to moral values by basic education students and their teachers. This text addresses only the value of justice. The responses of 111 10-13 year old children and 121 teenagers between 14 and 17 years of age at public and private schools in the city of São Paulo (SP-Brazil) were compared. Among the various topics addressed, some issues of distributive, retributive and commutative justice were selected. In the questionnaire, the alternatives offered were built in increasing stages of decentration from a social perspective inspired by Kohlberg. The results confirmed the two hypotheses that had been raised: there was a progression in the choice of the answers concerning the stages between children and teenagers and there were differences between the three forms of justice considered, in relation to the achievement of higher levels.

Book Review of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?": Aboriginal Communities, Restorative Justice, and the Challenges of Conflict and Change by Jane Dickson-Gilmore and Carol La Prairie

Over the past decade or two, restorative justice has become a popular approach for the criminal justice system to take in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. In part, this is due in all three countries to an appalling disproportionality in the incarceration rates for racialized minorities. As the authors of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken?" point out, however, governments have been attracted to restorative justice for cost-cutting reasons as well. A burning question, therefore, is whether restorative justice works.

Fairness, Justice and an Individual Basis for Public Policy

Prior models of the policy process have examined how human characteristics can affect policy decision-making in such a way that it leads to aggregate effects on policy outcomes as a whole. I develop a model of the policy process which suggests that emotions related to fair and unfair experiences in the same policy domain are utilized by decision-makers as policy criteria. In the lab, I empirically tested this, and find that emotions and experience related to fairness do influence the policy decision to move away from the status quo alternative. Based upon this result, I simulated the evolution of a society of agents engaged in decision-making using similar criteria. The simulation suggests that incentives have an important role in leading to cooperation and social success. The external validity of the simulation also implies that it can act as a platform for future evolutionary policy experimentation.

Criminal Justice. Ed. by Phyllis Gerstenfeld. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem, 2006.

Frazier reviews Criminal Justice edited by Phyllis Gerstenfeld.

Tempering the EU? NGO Advocacy in the Area of Freedom, Security, and Justice

The European Union’s (EU) area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ) portfolio comprises policy areas such as immigration and asylum, and police and judicial cooperation. Steps were taken to bring this field into the mandate of the EU first by the Maastricht Treaty, followed by changes implemented by the Amsterdam and Lisbon Treaties, the last one ‘normalizing’ the EU’s erstwhile Third Pillar. As the emergent EU regime continues to consolidate in this field, NGOs of various kinds continue to seek to influence policy-making and implementation, with varying success. This article seeks to establish the context in which NGOs carry out their work and argues that the EU-NGO interface is impacted both by the institutional realities of the European Union and the capacities of EU-oriented NGOs to seize and expand opportunities for access and input into the policy cycle. Using EU instruments representing three different policy bundles in AFSJ (immigration, asylum and judicial cooperation in criminal matters), the article seeks to map out NGO strategies in engaging and oftentimes resisting European Union policy instruments.