Conciliations in juvenile criminal justice: socio-institutional plots and legal sensitivities: Conciliations in juvenile criminal justice: socio-institutional plots and legal sensitivities

Abstract

This work presents a set of empirically informed reflections on the local management of conciliation agreements, an "alternative" way of resolving the juvenile criminal dispute, as practiced in a medium-scale judicial department Buenos Aires province. The analysis focuses on the characterization and problematization of legal sensitivities and socio-institutional plots produced and deployed within the framework of interactions between actors - judicial operators, victims, victims and family members -, who from different positions dispute and negotiate values and senses around this arrangement, conceived by judicial operators from a "restorative justice" approach. The article follows from an ongoing ethnographic process within the framework of my doctoral research project in Anthropology. The information is produced by combining qualitative techniques such as participating observation, interviews and conversations with actors in privileged procedural spaces such as subpoenas, hearings and meetings within the framework of the judicial process, and in their everyday life contexts.