UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines how crime victims' pleas for recognition by the criminal justice system have been answered through the formation of county victim-witness agencies (VWAs) in California. It tells the story of "victim advocacy" as an idea, a field, and an institutional development in California. In California as elsewhere in the United States, over its forty-year history victim advocacy and VWAs came to embody two often competing visions of how the state should respond to individual crime victims: one which seeks to enhance victims' participation in criminal trials, including the creation of special "rights" for victims, and one which seeks to provide recovery services to victims apart from the criminal process. Whether VWAs have managed to pursue these two very different agendas with equal force, or alternatively whether one is typically sought at the expense of the other, has become the basis of speculation, debate, and criticism among criminal justice scholars. Responding to claims that a VWA's institutional host encourages one agenda over the other, especially critiques that VWAs placed within District Attorney's offices have largely succumbed to prosecutorial and/or punitive agendas, this dissertation finds only mild variation in what California's diverse set of fifty-eight VWAs do. It finds that welfarism - helping victims to recover emotionally, physically, and financially from victimization - is the most consistent feature of victim advocacy in California, and that VWAs have not transformed the way victims participate in criminal trials. While the term "victim advocacy" embodied the hope that victims might gain an independent voice in criminal proceedings through "rights", the term "victim assistance" better describes the welfarist tasks that California's VWAs emphasize.