Children can be profoundly affected both by exposure to violence between their parents and by criminal proceedings that may follow. Family Systems Theories (FST) highlight that such violence and its legal aftermath extend across the entire family system, implying that criminal justice responses to interparental violence should consider children as well. However, as Dutch criminal law and policy leave room for interpretation, it remains unclear whether children are recognized as victims and whether and how they are considered and discussed in interparental violence criminal proceedings. This explorative study examines (1) to what extent children exposed to interparental violence are recognized as victims in interparental violence criminal proceedings, (2) whether, how and by whom children are discussed during hearings and (3) to what extent these practices reflect an FST approach. Drawing on courtroom observations in three Dutch District Courts, this study analyzes 54 intimate partner violence cases involving (former) partners with minor children, heard by single-judge divisions. The observed hearings indicate that children exposed to interparental violence are not recognized as victims in such proceedings. However, children are discussed in most cases. This occurs to varying degrees and in variable ways, implying an informal application of FST. A comparative analysis across the three courts further indicates notable variation, with the Rotterdam Court's combined hearings tending to devote relatively greater attention to children. The article concludes with recommendations for research and practice.
External medical access in custody depends not only on legal entitlement or clinical need, but on whether penal institutions translate those obligations into specific administrative routines. This article examines how written custody-facing policies structure the “last mile” between referral and external care. Using a convergent mixed-methods legal and policy design, the study analyzes public statutes, correctional directives, facility procedures, inspection and ombuds materials, procurement documents, and judicial decisions across four comparative cases: the United States, Canada's federal correctional framework, England and Wales, and Australia. The article develops and applies a Policy Facilitation Index (PFI) to assess five domains: escort duty explicitness, escort authorization and prioritization, scheduling and rebooking, notification and confirmation, and documentation, oversight, and contractual clarity. Scores show substantial cross-jurisdictional variation. England and Wales and Canada score highest, with composite scores of 88 and 85, reflecting more explicit duty allocation, authorization pathways, rebooking expectations, notification practices, and documentation requirements. Australia scores 65, indicating moderate specificity with state and territory variation. The United States scores 47, reflecting fragmented authority across constitutional doctrine, accreditation, local policy, contract design, and litigation. The findings show that external health care access in custody is a problem of penal administrative governance: formal rights become meaningful only when converted into visible, assignable, and reviewable routines. The PFI provides an exploratory framework for comparing how written custody-facing policies specify the administrative pathway to external medical care.
The crime literature widely recognizes the influence of people flow in the creation of crime opportunities. While efforts have been made to account for human mobility in crime prediction, previous studies are restricted to aggregated measures of people displacements, overlooking both incidents that occurred during trips and the socioeconomic profile of potential targets. This paper analyzes bike robberies targeting cyclists during their trips in São Paulo (Brazil) from a street-level perspective, using origin and destination survey data to provide socioeconomic information on pass-through cyclist flows, such as income, age and sex. Hotspots are identified using network kernel density estimation, and a geographically weighted logistic regression explores the spatially varying impact of 15 urban features on whether or not a street segment is likely to be within the influence range of a crime occurrence. Evidence showed that not only does the cyclist profile have an influence on bike robberies, but also that the effect of all risk factors varies spatially. Bike robbery likelihood varied from −2% to 5% given a 100-unit increase in the cyclist volume. Increasing the cyclist age in 1 year would cause a 4% increase in the robbery probability in some streets, whereas it would reduce by 9% in other. In addition to identifying bike robbery risk factors, the proposed approach indicated the streets where a higher variation in the risk factors leads to a higher increase in crime likelihood, providing valuable information to the cyclist community and police patrolling toward improving security levels during bike trips.
Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole (LWOP) is a severe, inflexible sentencing tool used in all states except Alaska. It is uniquely American both in terms of its breadth and its application to groups often considered protected from the most severe punishments in other democratic countries. Despite its scale, official reporting of sentencing and corrections data provides little administrative transparency about this population. This gap is especially pronounced for people sentenced during emerging adulthood, a period increasingly addressed by “second look” and resentencing reforms and informed by research showing that criminal behavior declines, and cognitive and psychological development continues well past age 18. Yet, no national data exist on how many people serving LWOP committed their crimes or were sentenced during this period.This article addresses that gap. Drawing from a recently compiled 48-state dataset of people serving LWOP as of 2024, this analysis offers the first national account of the prevalence and demographic composition of the emerging-adult LWOP population and compares with those sentenced at older ages. The results show that emerging adults make up a substantial share of the national LWOP population. These findings provide a necessary empirical foundation for evaluating age-based sentence review mechanisms and illustrate the value of building baseline descriptive data in a domain long obscured by broad, coarse-grained prison population totals.
