Survival of the Protection Model? Competing Goals in Belgian Juvenile Justice
Belgium is a small (with a surface of 32.545 km2) but well-situated country in the northwest of Europe. It consists of over 10 million citizens (10,396,421 on 1 January 2004) of whom 6 million live in the Northern, Dutch-speaking part (Flanders), almost 3.4 million in the Southern, mostly French-speaking part and close to 1 million in the region of Brussels (bilingual). As in other European countries, families in Belgium are becoming smaller and smaller. The fertility rate is 1.56 children per woman. So Belgium is faced with an aging population, 15% of whom are older than 65. The portion of juveniles (0–19 years) has diminished from 24.6% in 1990 to 22.4% in 2003 and the prognosis is a further decrease to 20.2% in 2021 (VRIND, 2003). On 1 January 2004 Belgium consisted of approximately 875,000 juveniles aged 12–17,1 almost half a million of them live in the Flemish region, more than 300,000 in the Walloon part and over 75,000 in the region of Brussels.2
The blurred vision of Lady Justice for minors with mental disorders: records of the juvenile court in Belgium.
PURPOSE
This study examined (1) the information present in juvenile court records in Belgium (Flanders) and (2) whether there are differences in information between records that mention a mental disorder and those that do not.


METHOD
The file study sample included 107 court records, and we used a Pearson's chi-square test and a t-test to analyze the information within those records.


RESULTS
Information in juvenile court records varied considerably. This variability was evident when we compared juvenile court records with and without mention of a mental disorder. Significantly more information about school-related problems, the functioning of the minor, and the occurrence of domestic violence was included in records that mentioned a mental disorder compared with records that did not.


CONCLUSION
The content of the juvenile court records varied, particularly with regard to the mental health status of the minor in question. We suggest guidelines to standardize the information contained in juvenile court records.
Three Strikes as a Public Policy: The Convergence of the New Penology and the McDonaldization of Punishment
This article analyzes the theoretical principles of the recently legislated “three strikes and you're out” laws. In many respects, these are related to the “new penology” that shifted the focus of criminological and penological interest from the individual offender toward the control of aggregates. Furthermore, the analysis relates the three-strikes measures to the cultural model of the “McDonaldization” of society in which the principles of the fast-food restaurant dominate many aspects of American society. These principles include efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control mainly by non-human technology. The analysis in this article, which focuses especially on the three-strikes law in California, suggests that three-strikes laws can be viewed as a part of the McDonaldization trend.