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

博士生阿维Brisman（埃默里大学），由博士监督大卫纽金特，将进行研究法律的意识，这是人们如何理解，想象和使用法律，以及他们的态度和对法律的感情。 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）的了解以及他们如何知道他们所知道的。 该项目深入探讨了与纽约布鲁克林的一个多管辖区社区法院（红钩社区司法中心或RHCJC）有关的青年法律的意识的发展。 RHCJC还作为一个社区中心，为自愿来到RHCJC参加社区组织，发展，赋权，领导和艺术计划的青年提供广泛的计划。 研究的重点是探讨青年如何看待执法和法院，以及他们如何看待正义和公平。 更具体地说，中心的研究问题是：1）如何塑造法律的意识的不同类型的经验，青年与法律和刑事司法系统通过青年方案在RHCJC？2)这些独特的经验如何塑造或定义他们的法律的意识的实质性？三、除了对法律的意识的培养或影响外，青少年法律中心的青少年活动对青少年的生活还有哪些影响？ 研究人员正在收集数据，通过正在进行的民族志实地考察在雷德胡克，包括参与者观察和非正式和半结构化的采访。在参与者参与的不同阶段对他们进行了访谈，以了解青年的法律的意识是否可能通过与方案中其他行为者的持续互动而随着时间的推移而发生变化。这一项目很重要，因为它将阐明青年人对法律和法律的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。 该项目还将使我们更好地了解如何对资源（财政和人力资源）进行投资，以发展青年、社区、社会及其富有成效的未来。

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.