From Segregation To Coincidence:the Embedded Development Of Social Work In The Field Of Juvenile Justice

With regard to the cooperation between social work and the field of juvenile justice, the earliest known is community-based correction. However, a juvenile, after committing a crime and before entering community-based correction or imprisoning correction, shall go through the criminal procedures of public security organs, prosecutingorgans and people's courts. During the criminal proceedings lasting half a year to three years, juvenile criminal suspects will face the most difficult situation in their life and generally feel anxious, confused and helpless. Thus, the involvement of social work service is urgently needed. However, in China, due to the structural defect of the past judicial system, there is no legal position for social work in the judicial procedures of public security organs, prosecutingorgans and people's courts. This situation goes against the society-based correction and society-based rehabilitation of juvenile criminal suspects and the humanity construction of juvenile justice system. Since 2009, B City has begun to explore the model of social work in the field of juvenile justice and achieved significant results. From the point of view of relationship, there. is a close cooperative relationship formed between social work and juvenile justice; from the point of view of structure, social work blends preliminarily with the field of juvenile justice. Then, how is the model of social work constructed in the field of juvenile justice in B City? In other words, how is social work embedded into the field of juvenile justice and how does it reflect and give play to its professional role and function? How does the internal logic of the constructive action work? Obviously, the research on these questions is conducive to the perfection of the theory and the policy of judicial social work and the improvement of the level of judicial social work practice. For this reason, the questions raised above naturally became the central issues of the research.The research mainly adopts qualitative research methods and it is a participatory and tracking research that lasts 6 years. During the period, the author adopted qualitative research methods such as documents collection, participatory observation and interview to collect data and found important information contained in data through retrospecting major events. From such information, the author found the influencing factors and intrinsic logical relationship of field interaction and explains the overall relationship of the interaction between social work and the field of juvenile justice in B City. At the same time, the author reveals the action strategy of movers to promote the interaction between social work and the field of juvenile justice in combination with the law and institution background behind those events.The following five points are the core research findings of this paper:First, "isolation" and "affinity" are the relational bases for the embedding of social into the field of juvenile justice. For a long time,the social work and the field of juvenile justice have been in isolation. For instance, there was no interaction in any form between social work and juvenile justice in B City and they're completely separated from each other before 2009. The fundamental reasons lay in the lack of the awareness of juvenile justice, the structural defect of juvenile justice system, and the insufficiency of professionalism of social work. However, both of the legislation advocacy derived from the macro level and the urgent need of reforming and innovating juridical practice together determined that juvenile justice system had an internal motivation to adopt professional social work, and the affinity trend between the two is becoming evident day by day.Second, the involvement of social work in the field of juvenile justice is an embedded development process. The embedding subject is the professional social work, the embedding object is the field of juvenile justice, and the embedded content is social work service. The embedding of ideas, the embedding of service and the institutional construction constitute the basic action logic for the embedding of social work into juvenile justice. The embedding of ideas is the basis and prerequisite for the embedding of service and the institutional construction and plays a decisive role in the whole action process. The embedding of service is the core content of the embedding action and the original intention and ultimate goal of the introduction of professional social work into the field of juvenile justice. The institutional construction is an important guarantee for the stable and sustained development of the embedding action and also the inevitable result of the effective embedding of ideas and service. Although the embedding of ideas, the embedding of service and the institutional construction have evolution features, the three aspects are interpenetrating and interrelated.Third,'"embedding" and "inter-construction" are basic characteristics of the interaction between social work and juvenile justice. From the perspective of social work, the experience of interaction between it and the field of juvenile justice is an "embedded development" process, but the "embedded development" of social work in the field of juvenile justice is not "one-way embedding", but the result of interaction between them. During the interaction, the absorption and recognition of social work in the field of juvenile justice are crucial. The existence and the huge appeal of the "structural hole" in juvenile justice system is the prerequisite to absorb the involvement of social work. The substantial recognition of juvenile justice on social work is the essential guarantee for the continuous development social work in the field of juvenile justice. The "inter-construction" between social work and juvenile justice effectively remedies the structural defect of juvenile justice in order that it could give play to juvenile crime prevention function in a better way and meanwhile facilitates the construction of juvenile justice social work service system.Fourth, "coincidence" is the result of the interaction between social work and the field of juvenile justice. The so-called "coincidence" means that social work and juvenile justice, as two independent things, begin to interact with each other due to interior and exterior motivation and realize the intersection and coincidence of field functions after having experienced a series of confrontations and integration. The basis of coincidence is the coincidence between the idea of "educational penalty" and the basic idea of social work. The realization approach of coincidence is the embeddedness action of social work and the function assignment and expansion of the field of juvenile justice. The goal of coincidence is that the two parties can together pay close attention to the rights and the welfare of the juvenile criminals.Fifth, the "embedded development" of social work in the field of juvenile justice is the result of movers' performing effective action strategies. During the course that social work enters into the field of juvenile justice and provides service, it is confronted with three kinds of dilemmas concerning legitimacy, resources and professionalism. The legitimacy dilemma means that the field of justice may doubt the legitimacy of social work service as there is no explicit law regulating this; the resources dilemma means that social work service, as a "new-born" and "disadvantaged" service, may have insufficient funds or relevant material guarantee; the professionalism dilemma means that providing service to the juvenile criminal is a very complex issue and thus poses extremely great challenge to the professionalism of social work. In the course of solving the above-mentioned problems, the movers in social work and the field of juvenile justice efficiently made use of the institutional capital, the cultural capital and their personal wisdom, which promoted the preliminary coincidence of social work and juvenile justice field.In a word, the historic logic, the realistic logic and the unified process of the preliminary construction of juvenile justice social work system is from isolation to embedding, to inter-construction and then to coincidence.