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

博士生Avi Brisman （Emory University）将在David Nugent博士的指导下进行关于法律意识的研究，即人们如何理解、想象和使用法律，以及他们对法律的态度和感受。过去的研究通常集中在成年人身上，忽视了年轻人对法律或刑事司法系统（特别是执法和法院）的了解，以及他们是如何知道自己所知道的。该项目深入探讨了与纽约布鲁克林多司法管辖区社区法院（红钩社区司法中心或RHCJC）有关的青少年法律意识的发展。RHCJC也是一个社区中心，为自愿来到RHCJC的年轻人提供广泛的项目，参与社区组织、发展、赋权、领导和艺术项目。研究的重点是探讨青少年如何看待执法和法院，以及他们如何构想正义和公平。更具体地说，中心研究问题是：1)通过RHCJC的青年项目，青少年对法律和刑事司法系统的不同体验如何塑造法律意识？2)这些独特的经历如何塑造或界定他们法律意识的实质？3)除了法律意识的培养或影响之外，RHCJC的青少年项目对青少年的生活还有哪些影响？研究人员正在reddhook通过正在进行的人种学田野调查收集数据，包括参与者观察和非正式和半结构化访谈。在参与者参与的不同阶段对他们进行了采访，以捕捉年轻人的法律意识随着时间的推移通过与项目中其他参与者的持续互动而改变的可能性。这个项目很重要，因为它将阐明青年对法律和法律机构在其社区中的作用的设想，以及他们自己在与正式社会控制机构和代理人合作中的地位。该项目还将提高我们对如何投资资源（财政和人力）以发展青年、社区、社会及其富有成效的未来的理解。

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.