The impetus of the drug court movement can be traced to a number of factors, such as the social and organizational costs of imprisonment and the literature surrounding the effectiveness of community-based treatment. Regardless of its origins, however, drug courts have altered the way in which court systems process drug cases and respond to drugdependent offenders. Evaluations of U.S. drug court...

The problem of drug-exposed infants has been a societal concern for more than a decade. The Future of Children devoted its first journal issue in spring 1991 to this topic and has provided information updates in subsequent journal issues. The 1991 issue reviewed the major trends in judicial, legislative, and treatment responses to this problem, reporting that, for the most part, appellate court...

 In addition, the courts also examine previous court decisions that applied and interpreted the Criminal Code in cases with similar facts and issues as the case at hand. This is called “case law” or “precedent.” Judgments from the Supreme Court of Canada are the most authoritative source of case law. They are binding in every other court in Canada (meaning, subsequent judgments must follow the...

The treatment of juveniles within the criminal justice systems is a matter of great variety in the 11 European countries studied comparatively. The study focuses on the age of criminal responsibility, ways to divert juvenile offenders from the criminal justice system or avoid criminal justice responses to them, juvenile proceedings and special reactions and sanctions. In spite of different appr...

Computer forensic software is used by lawyers and law enforcement to collect and preserve data in a “forensic image” so that it can be analyzed without changing the original media, and to preserve the chain of custody of the evidence. To the extent there are vulnerabilities in this software, an attacker may be able to hide or alter the data available to a forensic analyst, causing courts to ren...

o Courts should adopt court performance measures to ensure that they can track cases, to increase accountability, and to inform decisions about the allocation of court resources; and o Incentives and requirements should be established for effective collaboration between courts and child welfare agencies on behalf of children in foster care; and o Children and parents should have a strong voice ...

I. ISSUE In the child welfare context, protective agencies, the courts, and attorneys often turn to psychologists to evaluate parenting capacity. This issue brief aids attorneys representing parents in child welfare proceedings by: (1) describing the components and methodology of a typical parenting capacity evaluation; (2) describing the uses and limitations of a parenting capacity evaluation;...