Doctoral Dissertation Research: Legal Consciousness Among Youth at the Red Hook Community Justice Center

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Doctoral student Avi Brisman (Emory University), supervised by Dr. David Nugent, will undertake research on legal consciousness, which is how people understand, imagine, and use the law, as well as their attitudes and feelings towards the law. Past research has typically focused on adults, neglecting a consideration of what young people know about the law or the criminal justice system (specifically, law enforcement and courts) and how they know what they know. This project provides an in-depth exploration of the development of legal consciousness among youth associated with a multi-jurisdictional community court (the Red Hook Community Justice Center or RHCJC) in Brooklyn, New York. The RHCJC also functions as a community center, offering a wide range of programs for youth who come to the RHCJC voluntarily to participate in community organizing, development, empowerment, leadership, and artistic programs. The focus of the research is to explore how youth perceive law enforcement and courts, and how they conceive of justice and fairness. More specifically, the central research questions are: 1) How is legal consciousness shaped by the different kinds of experiences that youth have with the law and the criminal justice system via the youth programs at the RHCJC? 2) How do those unique experiences mold or define the substantive nature of their legal consciousness? and 3) Aside from the development of or impact on legal consciousness, what other effects do the youth programs at the RHCJC have on the lives of the youth? The researcher is gathering data through on-going ethnographic fieldwork at Redhook, including participant observation and informal and semi-structured interviews. Interviews with participants are being done at different stages of their participation, to capture the possibility that the youth's legal consciousness changes over time through sustained interactions with other actors in the program. This project is important because it will shed light on the role that youth imagine for law and legal institutions in their community, as well as their own place in working with institutions and agents of formal social control. This project will also improve our understanding of how to invest in the resources (financial and human) to develop youth, community, society and their productive futures.