Introduction

Paper has long been of interest to scholars examining the ordering and administration of our daily lives. Regardless of whether the focus is on the subjectivities or regimes of governance enabled through form filling, the extant literature emphasizes that documents are not just passive recorders and conveyers of information (Smith Reference Smith1984; Reed Reference Reed and Riles2006; Riles Reference Riles and Riles2006b; Latour, quoted in Levi and Valverde Reference Levi and Valverde2008; Hull Reference Hull2012a; Mulla Reference Mulla2014). Rather, they act in such a way that they create shared understandings of the world (Heimer Reference Heimer and Riles2006; Riles Reference Riles and Riles2006a), bridge organizational divides (Weisser Reference Weisser2014), and undermine modernist imaginings of state and civil society binaries (Sharma and Gupta Reference Sharma and Gupta2006).

Existing examinations of how documents create consensus and reconfigure modernist binaries suggest their relevance to penal regimes that increasingly rely on relations of devolution to prosecute and punish offenders. However, few explore the ways forms facilitate criminal justice and community partnerships and enable state power to govern through community (Rose Reference Rose1996; Garland Reference Garland2001) and subsequently at a distance (Garland Reference Garland1996). To examine these phenomena, this article analyzes the work of paper within five specialized domestic violence plea courts in Toronto, Canada. I focus specifically on four administrative documents deployed by a team of grassroots intake workers known as the partner abuse response (PAR) coordinators, who routinely attend these venues to enroll domestic violence abusers into counseling programs. Toronto's plea courts, known as the early intervention (EI) courts, are a prime locale for examining how paper acts to contour and redefine state-civil society boundaries in legal assemblages. Unlike most problem-solving initiatives, the EI prosecution process relies heavily on nonstate workers, not only for the delivery of court-mandated counseling programs for abusive men, but also for its daily operation. The PAR coordinators attend each, and every, EI session and work alongside the crown prosecutor and defense counsel in the courtroom. In theory, the workers are present only for the purposes of undertaking the purely administrative activities of assisting defendants with the selection of their counseling programs, filling in the requisite paperwork to secure their enrollment, and forwarding their forms to the requisite counseling provider.

The EI court is one of two specialized court models currently in operation in all five provincial courthouses in Toronto to address low-risk cases of domestic violence committed by first-time offenders. A team of specialized domestic violence prosecutors screens cases to determine whether they meet the court's criteria. Defendants deemed eligible are provided with two options once admitted into the courts: to plead guilty to their offenses and attend an accredited, sixteen-week court-mandated counseling program; or to plead not guilty to their cases and proceed to trial. If defendants opt to proceed through the EI court, they will attend counseling as a condition of bail and return to the court for sentencing once they finish their programs.

The purpose of the PAR coordinator's presence in the courts is to ensure that the referral process is centralized and that defendants only attend one of the eleven organizations in the city accredited by the provincial government to provide domestic violence counseling for court-mandated offenders. The court's reliance on the intake worker also prevents cases from becoming lost in the system and facilitates communication between the prosecutors and counselors. The PAR coordinator's forms are critical to keeping tabs on the relations established between defendants, the courts, and counseling agencies. However, as this analysis shows, the documents exert a number of contingent effects within the court network that far surpass these administrative and bureaucratic objectives.

The Par Coordinator and her Documents

The documentsFootnote ¹ deployed by the PAR coordinators serve three primary functions. Specifically, the forms assist the workers with the collection and recording of information about defendants and their selected programs; enable the sharing of information about offenders between the PAR coordinators, the counseling organizations, and the courts; and, in the latter years of the initiative, one form in particular evolved as a critical instrument for mollifying disagreements between counselors and crown prosecutors, as the latter began to deviate from the original and mutually agreed-upon rules for determining the suitability of cases for the plea courts.

The coordinator's collection of forms includes four administrative templates: the intake form, the referral form, the global bail form (formerly known as the bail template), and, when required, the acknowledgment form. The most basic of the four, the intake form, serves as a receptacle for a defendant's demographic information, such as name, date of birth, and address. The referral form, which is filled out after an accused has selected a program from a roster of eleven organizations, provides defendants with the name and contact information of their chosen agency. The document also serves as a confirmation that they understand some of the basic rules of the court, such as requirements to contact their counseling organizations within forty-eight hours of the court date. The global bail form is the current—and more complex—manifestation of its predecessor, the bail template. The document lists the plea court's standard bail conditions, which are routinely added to the existing bails for all offenders who opt for the specialized prosecution of their cases.

In its original incarnation, the bail form functioned predominately as a memory tool to assist prosecutors with relaying the court's recommended bail conditions. However, as the courts evolved, the same form with a few minor additions transformed into an entirely new instrument now used by the PAR coordinator to relay, modify, and explain the bail amendment process and the court's standard conditions. Whereas filling out the original bail template was a straightforward process that did not even require the presence of defendants for completion, nowadays the document compels the intake workers to perform a series of responsibilities far more reminiscent of a defense attorney than a mere form filler.

Finally, the acknowledgment form, created in the late 2000s, serves a far more complicated purpose—and possesses a far more complicated history—than any of the previous documents discussed. This document is a convoluted admission of wrongdoing that offenders sign in lieu of a guilty plea. The form is reserved for defendants who have been promised peace bonds following the successful completion of their programs, rather than the two standard noncustodial sentences typically given in the courts. The acknowledgment form emerged directly from an incident referred to as the PAR freeze, a boycott of the EI courts that the counseling providers launched to protest prosecutorial decisions to allow abusers into counseling programs without first pleading guilty. The decision sparked concerns among program providers for a variety of philosophical and practical reasons, which are discussed in detail in the latter half of the article. As an admission of wrongdoing, but not guilt, the acknowledgment form materialized as a remedy to the conflicts that spurred the PAR protest. As will be demonstrated, the process of completing the document requires the PAR coordinator to engage in a slew of conversations about guilt, innocence, and evidence that make her sound and appear far more like a crown prosecutor than the intake worker she is meant to be.

While the PAR coordinators have used the intake and referral forms since the emergence of the specialized plea courts in 1999, the second two materialized in the latter half of the court's fifteen-year lifespan. The multiplication and increasing complexity of the documents are both a cause and a reflection of the PAR coordinator's refashioning from an administrative form filler into a hybrid of the defense attorney and prosecutor. At times, the intake workers also adopt the expertise of therapeutic counselors, frequently lecturing defendants about the impact of violence on their loved ones and the importance of accepting responsibility for their abusive behavior. This role switching and mimicry occurs as an offshoot of their primary objective to get their forms signed.

I argue that the documents deployed by the PAR coordinator are foundational to generating the legal formations and practices required to operate the specialized domestic violence plea courts. Through examining forms as much more than simply instruments for collecting and storing information, I show how seemingly mundane administrative templates generate the practices and entities required to steer the courts past the obstacles that emerge in the legal network over time. The plea court documents formalize new constructs of wrongdoing and accountability, which deviate from typical legal conceptions of mens rea. These standardized and bureaucratic confessions ultimately prove to be more effective than traditional guilty pleas and legal remedies when resolving plea court cases. The forms also enable the PAR coordinators to become simulators of state sovereignty, capable of juggling multiple legal and administrative responsibilities in accordance with the vagaries of state power. In illuminating the constitutive dimension of the PAR coordinators' forms, this analysis shows that penal regimes involving a reliance on community as a governing strategy are far more multidimensional than single acts of state offloading, distant governing, and responsibilization (Garland Reference Garland1996; Hannah-Moffat Reference Hannah‐Moffat2000). Rather, the continued operation of these endeavors requires flexibility, perpetual restructuring, and ad hoc recalibrations on the part of state power, particularly in moments of crisis.

As instruments of devolution, the PAR coordinator's administrative forms accomplish the flexibility required of penal power in several ways. First, they mollify conflicts between prosecutors and counselors, allowing for continued collaboration despite their competing institutional interests. Additionally, by making the court actors interchangeable, the documents allow the PAR coordinators' responsibilities to expand in order to accommodate a variety of court constraints. Rising caseloads, turnovers in court personnel, funding cuts to legal aid, and temporary losses of public defenders in the courtroom are just a few of the problems endured in the plea courts since their implementation. Running them in spite of these hurdles has largely relied on the transformation of the PAR coordinators into amalgamations of the defense, prosecution, and, at times, therapeutic counselor.

The documents—particularly the acknowledgment form and the bail form—are integral to reconfiguring the subjectivities of the intake workers. Through distilling complex legal activities, such as explaining bail conditions and assessing wrongdoing, into a series of tasks that can easily be completed by “checking the appropriate box,” the forms facilitate the offloading of responsibilities from legal to nonlegal actors. The aesthetic features of these forms, such as empty boxes or the presence and absence of blanks, perform a critical role in the legal assemblage by transferring expertise from the defense and prosecution to the administrative workers. The outcome of these processes is the production of hybridized figures and constructs that possess the capacities to operate between and beyond traditional legal, bureaucratic, and adversarial boundaries. The transgressions and shape shifting the EI documents permit are essential to producing order in the plea courts. As they fill in their forms, the workers simultaneously fill the gaps of the plea court assemblage as it alters over time.

Before and after snapshots of the PAR coordinators when the courts first began in the late 1990s and now spotlight how drastically their subjectivities have shifted over the court's fifteen-year lifespan. Initially, the intake and referral process was straightforward, a rather mundane and routine bureaucratic act of information provision and collection. As purely administrative workers with no legal or paralegal training, the PAR coordinators were neither expected nor encouraged to engage with offenders in any legal capacity. In fact, Ontario government policies and procedures explicitly forbade them from engaging in any discussion of case facts or the criminal process. Consequently, an average intake session merely entailed meeting with offenders to assist them with selecting the most appropriate counseling program based on linguistic needs, work schedule, and geographic location. In general, the workers required no more than five to ten minutes to complete their forms and the interviews.

As the courts evolved, however, the intake process materialized into a far more complex, lengthy, and legalistic interaction between the coordinators and the defendants. In contrast to the early days of the courts, the PAR coordinators can now be found routinely explaining, drafting, and amending bail conditions; reviewing evidence; discussing case facts; encouraging and discouraging offenders from pleading guilty; and screening cases to assess their suitability for the counseling programs and the EI courts more generally. These intake interviews now generally range between fifteen and thirty minutes and bear little resemblance to the cursory, administrative interactions between the PAR coordinators and offenders that initially transpired when the domestic violence courts first evolved.

This analysis draws from empirical research on Toronto's domestic violence plea courts to explain how administrative forms—particularly things as miniscule and mundane as empty boxes and blanks—can recontour the institutional distinctions between court players and, in the process, fix the cracks in the court network that emerge over time. In drawing attention to how the forms act, this discussion both extends and departs from extant scholarship on the constitutive effects of documents in law and bureaucracy.

Typically, accounts of how paper performs tend to focus on the subjects the documents were designed to govern and, ultimately, the “form made persons” (Jacob Reference Jacob2007, 249) they produce in the process (Langer, Scourfield, and Fincham Reference Langer, Scourfield and Fincham2008; Cabot Reference Cabot2012; Huizenga Reference Huizenga2014). Instead of exploring how the documented—in this case, domestic violence offenders—are reconstituted through the forms, here I focus on how documents reconstruct the subjectivities of the form fillers. This analysis also extends anthropological scholarship on the ways documents make, remake, and undermine illusions of civil society and state binaries (Hull Reference Hull2012b), the distinction between which is critical to maintaining order in modern political regimes. Drawing on these insights, I show that order in this court ultimately relies on collapsing, rather than perpetuating, these distinctions. The findings of this discussion are also relevant to the literature examining the role of official legal documents in the governance of gender violence (Merry Reference Merry2006; Lazarus-Black Reference Lazarus‐Black2007), as well as studies on the documentation of victim narratives as they travel through the criminal justice system (Trinch Reference Trinch2003). In furthering this body of work, this discussion sheds light on how more mundane and largely overlooked administrative forms shape the prosecution of domestic violence and the governance of offenders.

In drawing attention to how the bureaucratic technology of the form shifts responsibilities for the prosecution of crime from state to nonstate actors, these findings are also relevant to discussions of the decline of penal modernism under neoliberal political rationalities in governance scholarship (Garland Reference Garland1996,Reference Garland2001; Pratt et al. Reference Pratt, Brown, Brown, Hallsworth and Morrison2013). Finally, through charting how documents reconfigure legal expertise within this specialized court initiative, this analysis also contributes to critical criminological scholarship on therapeutic jurisprudence. Following Moore's (Reference Moore2007a,b) and Hannah-Moffat and Maurutto's (Reference Hannah‐Moffat and Maurutto2012) analyses of how problem-solving courts drastically alter traditional adversarial practices, this exploration illuminates factors, figures, and knowledge so far unexplored in this process.

Methodology

While on the surface, the PAR coordinators' forms appear mundane, and, individually, they can easily be overlooked as meaningless, together the four documents provide crucial insight into the struggles and negotiations occurring between grassroots and legal actors over the court's fifteen-year lifespan. The documents not only generate the quasilegal subjectivities and constructs that allow the plea courts to function; as artifacts of legal practice, they also narrate the tugs of war between grassroots and criminal justice entities and the various ways governing networks accommodate these contestations. In spotlighting the micro relations that manifest as legal and state power (Silbey Reference Silbey2005; Calavita Reference Calavita2010), they provide insight into phenomena often obscured when examining the production of law and justice.

This discussion evolves from fourteen years of ethnographic research on Toronto's five domestic violence plea courts conducted intermittently between 1999 and 2013. During this time, I interacted with the courts as both a researcher and participant in the prosecution process. Between 1999 and 2002, I worked as one of the plea court's first PAR coordinators. The position was housed—and continues to be housed—with a grassroots feminist agency called the Coalition Against Violence (CAV),Footnote ² the organization largely responsible for pioneering and implementing the specialized domestic violence courts in Toronto. As the CAV's first PAR coordinator, I routinely filled in the blanks and checked the boxes on three of the four documents that serve as the subject of this analysis. I also drafted the original version of the bail template form, which I deployed as a tool to assist prosecutors with relaying the court's recommended bail conditions.

Since the courts were still in their infancy and only operational in two provincial court sites when I joined the CAV, my PAR coordinator responsibilities also involved expanding the specialized prosecution process to the remaining three provincial courthouses in the city. Engaging in the administration of intake interviews as well as the implementation of the courts at these initial stages allowed me to develop unique insights into how organizers of the initiative originally envisioned the legal division of labor between the PAR coordinators, crown prosecutors, defense attorneys, and counselors. My understanding of how these governing networks operated is further informed by my additional professional experience as a court-based victim support worker, a position I held between 2002 and 2004 and returned to for another four months in 2007. During this time, I worked closely with the domestic violence prosecutors and directly with victims in domestic violence cases. The position allowed me to acquire insight into the intricacies of the court's legal assemblages from an alternate perspective.

My fieldwork in the courts involved observing the PAR coordinators while they conducted their intake interviews with offenders. I engaged in court observation at various points between 2007 and 2013, during which time I and, more recently, my research assistant attended all five of the domestic violence plea court sites. This process largely entailed listening to and recording the intake workers' conversations with offenders, defense attorneys, crown prosecutors, and, when present, court interpreters. The four intake documents essentially serve as the blueprints for the conversations between defendants and intake workers. In so doing, they compel the form fillers to acquire the requisite information and agreements from the defendants to run the plea court process. While filling in the empty fields on the intake and referral forms is straightforward, for the forms that require confirmations of understanding and admissions of wrongdoing, the process is far more complex and, at times, extremely fraught. Direct observation of the intake sessions uncovered the various acts of persuasion, negotiation, and emulations of sovereign power the administrative workers routinely engage in to get their forms completed and signed. My field work included observations of intake sessions conducted by each member of the PAR coordinator team between 2009 and 2013. During this time, only one of the four intake workers left her position.

I supplemented my court observations with interviews with three of the four PAR coordinators, during which I obtained additional information about how the plea courts and the responsibilities of the intake worker have transformed over the past decade and a half. The interviews also provided me with the opportunity to acquire additional insights into my court observations. Finally, though they are not directly involved in the daily administration of cases, interviews conducted with program directors and counselors providing court-mandated counseling also inform my analysis.

The article begins with an overview of the specialized domestic violence plea court process to provide a sense of how the coordination of responsibilities between the intake workers, prosecutors, and defense attorneys are ideally supposed to transpire within this initiative. The discussion is contextualized in relation to the existing literature on therapeutic jurisprudence to illuminate the structural distinctions between Toronto's domestic violence plea courts and the court models that typically fall into this category. Unlike the vast majority of problem-solving courts, where community-based workers, defense attorneys, and prosecutors tackle the prosecution of cases as a team, within the EI courts, there is no structural basis for the knowledge transfers or role switching that occur; rather, intake workers and attorneys are required to operate individually, independently, and in a procession, much like an assembly line. This absence of a teamwork ethic in the domestic violence plea courts underscores the significance of the PAR coordinators' documents in producing the conglomerates required for the courts to function. The remainder of the discussion then demonstrates specifically how the forms accomplish the flexibilities in penal power required for the court's continued survival.

Therapeutic Jurisprudence and the Reshaping of Penality

Although Toronto's courts possess a unique origin story, the advent of specialized domestic violence courts in general is often attributed to the broader phenomena of therapeutic jurisprudence. Scholarship exploring the various ways this legal philosophy is reshaping the prosecution and punishment of crime is relevant to appreciating the influence of paper in the plea courts that are the focus of the discussion. Coined by David Wexler and Bruce Winnick in the mid-1990s, therapeutic jurisprudence emerged as an alternative prosecutorial strategy for certain crimes deemed unfixable by typical adversarial approaches (Wexler and Winnick Reference Wexler and Winnick1996). Pioneers of the philosophy advocated deploying law for problem solving, rather than for merely punitive reasons, with the ultimate aim of treating the root causes of crime (Berman Reference Berman2000,Reference Berman2005; Wexler Reference Wexler2000; Berman and Feinblatt Reference Berman and Feinblatt2001; Bentley and Bakht Reference Bentley and Bakht2004; Bakht Reference Bakht2005; Nolan Reference Nolan2009). Throughout North America, therapeutic jurisprudence has been deployed to prosecute offenses falling within one or more of the following categories: victimless offenses, such as prostitution and drug abuse; crimes where the offenders may be suffering from mental health issues; and crimes, such as domestic violence, where the adversarial system fails to capture the ongoing relationships between victims and accused persons.

In attempting to solve rather than merely respond to these problems, most therapeutic justice initiatives entail an array of modifications to traditional legal practices. One strategy regularly deployed in these courts is the prosecutorial technique of the team (Boldt Reference Boldt and Nolan2002; Bentley and Bakht Reference Bentley and Bakht2004; Moore Reference Moore2007a,b; Nolan Reference Nolan2009). The team player approach encourages judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and social workers to collaborate and reach consensus on how to proceed with cases. The ultimate consequence of this collaborative prosecutorial method, as Moore (Reference Moore2007b) shows, is the collapsing of these figures in the court network and the merging of psy and legal expertise in decision making. Exchanges of legal and therapeutic expertise to the point where judges sound like counselors, distinctions between defense and prosecution blur, and social workers regularly deploy the language of punishment when deliberating over cases are regular occurrences in the drug courts she examined (Moore Reference Moore2007b). In addition, traditional adversarial boundaries almost entirely dissolved. Within these specific models of problem-solving courts, instances of knowledge swapping emerge directly from prosecutorial endeavors to mix the expertise of the court's key players.

The Coordinated Response and Toronto's Specialized Domestic Violence Plea Court Assemblage

Although similar transgressions and circulations of expertise transpire within Toronto's plea court assemblage, unlike most therapeutic jurisprudence initiatives, specialized domestic violence courts do not rely on collaborative, team-based techniques for the prosecution of cases. Instead, these initiatives adopt a model for prosecuting cases known as the coordinated prosecution strategy. Coordinated prosecution court strategies envision a seamless criminal justice response to domestic violence in which all possible institutions involved in responding to victims and offenders—the police, prosecutors, probation, victim services, and providers of batterers programs—regularly communicate with one another to prevent abused women from slipping through systemic cracks (Pence and Paymar Reference Pence and Paymar1993). Unlike the team approach, these court models insist on an explicit demarcation of responsibilities between each of these sectors and a strict adherence to traditional adversarial practices.

While the coordinated prosecution model does encourage collaboration, the emphasis on intersectoral communication is largely promoted for the objective of victim safety, rather than the therapeutic goal of assessing a defendant's recovery or responsiveness to rehabilitation. The practice of coordinating prosecutions accordingly emphasizes the development of an administrative infrastructure to facilitate relationships between the criminal justice and community-based figures involved in monitoring cases and reforming abusers. To prevent victims from slipping through the systemic cracks, these court models require standardized guidelines to encourage increased communication between prosecutors and counseling providers, who are the only figures monitoring the EI offenders as their cases proceed through the criminal justice system. Ensuring that service providers know who to call if a defendant breaches his bail conditions or reoffends while in the counseling program is key. Just as important is a centralized referral process, particularly when multiple organizations are involved in the courts for the provision of court-mandated domestic violence counseling. Additionally, all coordinated prosecution models entail the provision of a small, dedicated team of trained prosecutors who oversee the administration of all the domestic violence cases funneled into the courthouse. Dedicated courtrooms, days, and times reserved exclusively for the prosecution of domestic violence incidents are the scheduling practices deployed to ensure compliance with this court model.

The objective of the coordinated response—specifically, the goal of creating a consistent, routine, and seamless prosecutorial initiative—permeates the daily practice and structure of Toronto's EI domestic violence plea courts. As an assembly-line model of justice, the prosecution of cases requires all the key figures—the PAR coordinator, the crown prosecutor, and the public defender—to conduct their responsibilities independently of one another and at a specific time and place in the courtroom. All the plea courts, which operate in the same way in each of the courthouses, reserve approximately one hour for the intake and referral of defendants. The intake session transpires during the court's lunch break, before official proceedings begin. The crown prosecutor starts the day with a ten-minute information session on the purpose of the EI court. The presentation informs offenders of the objective of the court, the importance of “intervening early in cases of domestic violence to prevent their escalation,” and instructions on what to do should a defendant wish to plead guilty and enroll in a counseling program. This is the only moment at which the prosecutor addresses offenders in any direct fashion. In the event defendants approach them with questions, prosecutors will immediately redirect them to speak with defense counsel or the intake workers.

Along with the specially trained domestic violence prosecutor, a dedicated representative from the public defender's office is also a routine participant in the plea court process. In accordance with traditional legal divisions of labor, the EI court model requires defense counsel to undertake their typical responsibilities, such as explaining the bail amendment process, assisting with discussions to plead or not plead guilty, and reviewing the implications of the sentences defendants will receive following the successful completion of their programs. Defense attorneys are also the only figures able to discuss the evidence or facts of the case as documented in the police synopsis of the assault.

After meeting with defense counsel, defendants then consult with the PAR coordinators to learn more about their counseling options and enroll into their programs. The intake and referral of offenders is the final stage of the plea court's intake session. The PAR coordinators assist defendants with the selection of their programs based on their work, geographic, and linguistic needs, and complete the requisite paperwork, which is later forwarded to counseling providers. The intake session officially ends when the judge enters the courtroom to commence official proceedings. When called to appear, defendants review the facts of their cases, register their guilty pleas, and obtain their sentencing dates from the court clerks, which are passed on to them via slips of pink or yellow paper. Prior to leaving the courthouse, they sign and retrieve their new bail conditions from the office of the Justice of Peace. Unless they require additional time to finish their programs, defendants do not return to court for another twenty weeks after their initial appearances. Their sentencing transpires following the completion of their counseling.

Despite guidelines requiring each of the court actors to operate within their silos, and a collaborative approach geared far more toward victim safety than offender rehabilitation, the transfer of knowledge and responsibilities in the plea court assemblage occurs regardless. The fact that these circulations transpire without the infrastructure characteristic of most therapeutic jurisprudence initiatives alludes to the presence of other forces at play, ones that erode and circumvent these divisions characteristic of this legal assemblage. Absent from the plea court structure are the types of staff meetings that regularly occur within the context of, for example, drug, mental health, and prostitution courts, where judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, and social workers gather around a table and consult about the cases listed on the docket. The theoretical insistence on maintaining separate legal spheres mandates prosecutors to limit their interactions with accused persons, firmly secures due process responsibilities with defense counsel, and explicitly confines PAR coordinators to their administrative roles. The remainder of the article examines in detail how the mundane administrative documents the PAR coordinators rely on to conduct their intake interviews shake up and restructure their responsibilities to cater to the vagaries of the prosecution process over time. The discussion reveals how the forms ultimately produce the quasilegal political formations and hybrids necessary to govern domestic violence through the criminal justice and community partnership and manage the institutional conflicts that emerge in the prosecution process over time.

Order in the Court: The Origins of the Par Coordinator and her Forms

To appreciate the significance of paper on the plea court assemblage, more detail on the PAR coordinators, specifically, their backgrounds, the qualifications required for their positions, and their roles in actualizing the coordinated prosecution approach to domestic violence, is necessary. The inclusion of an administrative coordinator as a direct participant in the domestic violence plea courts is a practice that first emerged in the early 1980s as part of the Duluth Abuse Intervention Project, the original template for the coordinated community and criminal justice court model. The feminist reformers involved in the legal initiative, most notably activist and social worker Ellen Pence, advocated for a court-based administrative figure to liaise between counseling providers and the prosecutors to ensure no case got lost in a bureaucratic shuffle.

Decades later, when organizers at the CAV implemented Toronto's EI plea courts, they borrowed the idea and successfully negotiated with the Ontario government to create the position of the PAR coordinator. The rationale for incorporating the intake worker into the court process stemmed from the multitude of agencies required to deliver court-mandated counseling due to the size of the city and its diverse demographics. The operation of the EI plea courts in five different courthouses also provided grounds for her inclusion. Centralizing the referral process through the PAR coordinator thus allows, for example, Glendale Community Services to anticipate the arrival of Mr. Smith from the Westbrook courthouse on a specific day. If Mr. Smith does not arrive, the service provider can then notify the prosecutor or police.

Given the PAR coordinator's ongoing interaction with defendants in the plea courts, both the CAV and the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, the government body responsible for funding and administering the courts, developed guidelines to circumscribe and guard against their involvement in cases. The intake workers operated in accordance with strict rules to refrain entirely from any discussion of the legal process, evidence, or facts of the case with offenders. The provision of any form of ad hoc legal advice during the course of their intake interviews was also explicitly forbidden.

The designation of the intake worker as a purely administrative figure did not require the PAR coordinator to possess legal or paralegal training to obtain her position. Far more integral to performing the position from the perspective of the CAV was the adoption of a feminist understanding of gender violence. Throughout the court's lifespan, the PAR coordinators have varied in their educational and professional backgrounds. In the first five years of the courts, the team included four employees, all of whom held graduate degrees in an array of fields including, criminology, women's studies, and social work. The most recent group of PAR coordinators includes Sheila, who obtained her degree in corrections from a local community college; Kelly, who possesses a background in business and economic administration, but also has previous experience in the field of feminist activism; and Amanda, a survivor of abuse, who secured her position through volunteering with the CAV. Thus, none of the intake workers possessed a legal background prior to working in the plea courts.

The fact the PAR coordinators now routinely draft bail conditions based on their own assessments of offender risk, relay court procedures to defendants, determine whether or not offenders admit to the requisite facts of their cases to plead guilty, and engage in a variety of other activities that indicate a transgression to their administrative roles, alerts us to the operation of far more subtle and contingent factors at work in their transitions from administrative to quasilegal actors. The remaining sections of the article detail how the forms instigate these modifications through charting the increasing complexity of the intake interview, from its origins as an administrative interaction into its current incarnation.

The Intake Form

In the first five years the courts operated, the intake and referral forms were the only two documents the PAR coordinators completed when assisting defendants with the referral process. Overall, the time required to complete both forms was relatively brief. The questions listed on the document reveal how limited in degree and depth the PAR coordinator's original interactions with defendants were in the early days of the courts. With the exception of a few additional fields added to the bottom of the document, the form has remained relatively unchanged since the late 1990s.Footnote ³

The intake form compels the PAR coordinator to ask defendants a series of routine demographic questions and to inquire into their linguistic and ethnoracial backgrounds to select an appropriate counseling program. The form contains four main categories of fields with the headings “Police Information,” “Client Information,” “Partner Information,” and “Agency Information.” To complete the first field, the PAR coordinators retrieve information from the crown prosecutor's brief and a document called the police synopsis. The police synopsis includes the requisite information about the officer in charge of the case, such as name, badge number, and police division. Additional identifying information, such as the name of the presiding judge, is recorded when official court proceedings begin.

The second section labeled “Client Information” requires the PAR coordinator to ask defendants basic questions, such as their full names, addresses, dates of birth, and phone numbers. Additional information regarding the defendant's living arrangements, as well as the likelihood of reconciliation while in the program, is also recorded. The fields in the category “Partner Information” require the PAR coordinator to collect information about the victim in the matter, specifically her address, phone number, age, country of birth, and linguistic needs. The collection of information is for the CAV's files, as well as for the counseling agency.

“Agency Information” requires the PAR coordinator to ask potential program participants questions about their employment status, work schedules, language preferences, and ethnoracial backgrounds. The questions allow the intake workers to retrieve the requisite information about the defendants' needs to conduct their referrals. As noted earlier, Toronto's plea court is serviced by a roster of eleven community-based organizations enlisted to provide court-mandated counseling in a variety of languages. A field entitled “Specialized Program” enables her to document whether an offender requires women's programming or a same-sex counseling group. The form also necessitates inquiries into whether defendants identify as Aboriginal Canadian; the question is posed not only to assess the appropriateness of an aboriginal counseling program, but to also determine whether the authorities prefer to prosecute these cases through the city's specialized aboriginal courts.

The Referral Form

In the years when the intake interview actually transpired in accordance with the original vision of the PAR coordinators' responsibilities, the referral form was the only other document the intake worker deployed when the courts first emerged. The referral form is essentially a template defendants sign to verify their awareness that counseling attendance is court mandated. Specifically, the document confirms their knowledge of requirements to contact their selected counseling organizations within two working days of their court appearances, pay any fees for the program as determined by the agencies or the courts, and sign their new bail papers prior to leaving the courthouse. Additional statements in the text remind offenders that consequences will ensue if they fail to phone their selected counseling organization within two working days. The document also includes provisos disallowing the commencement of counseling until the new bail form is signed. Included on the top of the referral form is a section with the heading “To be Completed by Intake Worker.” These fields require the coordinator to complete the administrative tasks of filling in the name, address, and requisite information about the selected counseling organization.

The participation of the PAR coordinator in mediating the form is overt and identifiable. Located below the conditions are four blanks provided to collect the signatures of the client and the intake worker, along with the date. In addition to rendering the defendant's understanding of the EI court rules legible, the empty blanks also make the PAR coordinator's role as explicator of the form transparent.

Observations of the document at face value thus might suggest that the PAR coordinator has always been more than just an administrative form filler; to get defendants to sign the form, she must, to a certain degree, engage in responsibilities that typically fall within the purview of the defense. However, when examined within the context of the assembly-line division of labor, which characterizes the plea court network, it is clear that the referral form is a reiteration, rather than the origin, of these instructions. As the third and final figure in the intake process, the PAR coordinator repeats the rules already relayed by the crown prosecutors and the defense attorneys when completing the referral form. EI defendants learn about the bail amendment process, specifically, requirements to contact their counseling programs and sign their new bail conditions, at two points in the court process: in the beginning, when the crown prosecutors give the standard information session, and during the course of their discussions with defense counsel, to whom they are required to speak before meeting with the intake workers. In this sense, the responsibilities the referral form compels the PAR coordinator to take on are redundant and do not, in practice, require a deviation from her administrative role.

In sum, the intake and referral forms provide clues into the early days of the domestic violence plea courts, when the legal network operated as the assembly line it was originally meant to be, and the PAR coordinators acted as generic form fillers in the assemblage. These documents also exerted a circumscribing effect on the PAR coordinators' responsibilities; as the only two forms guiding their interactions with defendants, they restricted what could and could not be said during the intake interviews. However, the addition of the global bail form and the acknowledgment form to the referral process now overrides the influence of the original paperwork. The final section of this discussion explores the material life and moments of creation of these latter two documents. I then draw on my observations of PAR coordinator and defendant relations to illuminate their effects.

“Do you Understand these Conditions?” the Par Coordinator and the Trajectory of the Bail Form

When I returned to the plea courts in 2009 for my fieldwork, the conversations occurring between the PAR coordinators and defendants in relation to the global bail form—a template of the court's standard bail conditions—bore little resemblance to the ones required to complete the earlier version of the form. The following excerpt from one of Sheila's intake interviews is typical of how the PAR coordinators now routinely interact with EI court defendants:

Sheila:	When you plead guilty today, you will have a new set of bail conditions. [She takes out the bail template form.] Once you sign your new bail, you can have contact with written revocable consent. You need proof from your girlfriend. She has to write you a letter saying she wants contact.
Defendant:	Oh, I already gave the letter from her to the crown.
Sheila:	Okay, but you need to have a copy of it on yourself at all times. If the cops pull you over without it, you'll be locked up and you [will have to] pay $500—it's a breach of your bail not to have it. And if you stop going [to the program], the letter is no longer valid.
	You will also need to show the counseling agency proof of income so they can determine how much to charge you per session. It's based on a sliding scale. You will need to keep the peace and be of good behavior and abstain from possessing a firearm. Do you understand all these conditions?

By the late 2000s, the global bail form became a second document in the PAR coordinator's collection of templates requiring a signature and confirmation of understanding from EI defendants. In contrast to the referral form, however, the document requires the intake worker to engage in far more elaborate and legalistic explanations to get the form signed. As noted earlier, the global bail form is a modified version of an older document known as the bail template, which first materialized in the court network in the early 2000s. Unlike the current version, the bail template was never meant to be an instrument for the PAR coordinator to relay and explicate the plea court conditions. Rather, it was a tool I created when I worked as the PAR coordinator to assist crown prosecutors with amending bail orders in the newly developed plea courts. I conceived of the form after several hectic sessions in the plea courts when my expanding caseloads required that I be in two places at once: beside the prosecutor in the courtroom to assist her as she verbally relayed the conditions to the judge and court clerk, and outside the courtroom on a hallway bench as I conducted my intakes, a task I was ideally supposed to finish before the judge entered the courtroom to begin the official proceedings.

The bail template performed as both my stand-in and a memory tool. Completing the form did not necessitate an explanation to defendants, nor did it even require their presence. In fact, the typical PAR coordinator form-filling protocol involved a quick fill of the blanks after meeting with defendants. The PAR coordinator then placed the templates in the prosecutor's briefs, retrieving them at the end of the day. By the late 2000s, however, this practice transformed drastically, as the document circulated through the legal assemblage over time and eventually resurfaced as the global bail form, as it is now known in the local vernacular.

Three processes influenced the metamorphosis of the bail form from a prosecutorial memory tool to an explanatory instrument for defendants: cuts to legal aid, which triggered the removal of the public defender from the EI legal assemblage; the convenient location of the PAR coordinators in the network, which allowed them to easily fill the gap left by the public defender's departure; and the aesthetics of the form. The first two factors generated significant changes in the EI legal assemblage, all of which were noticeable when I returned to the courts in 2009 for court observation. Not only were the PAR coordinators explaining the bail conditions and the consequences of breaches to offenders, with the loss of the public defender, the intake workers also materialized as the ultimate authorities on defendants and their cases. Evidence of their augmented status was visible throughout their interactions with others in the court network. Court staff, private defense counsel, and crown prosecutors frequently stopped by the PAR coordinator's hallway table to ask an array of questions relating to the appropriateness of cases for the EI process, the procedures involved in securing written revocable consent, and whether additional forms of counseling should be included in the revised set of conditions. The enhanced status of the PAR coordinators became even further apparent during the course of more recent court observations conducted in 2013. Currently, the PAR coordinators perform their intakes from their own private rooms reserved for their use during the EI court process. This room comes equipped with its own fax machine and telephone. This more official setup contrasts drastically with the initial one established when the courts first evolved. Back in the late 1990s, the PAR coordinators were provided with nothing beyond a bench in the hallway to conduct their intakes.

I inquired about the loss of the public defender and subsequent expansion of PAR coordinator responsibilities during a joint interview I conducted with the team of intake workers in 2009. In response, Sheila, the most senior PAR coordinator at the time, notified me that public defenders could no longer be part of the intake portion of the plea courts and available to speak with defendants, given that these sessions occurred during the courthouse's lunch break. Funding cuts essentially meant that they would be forced to provide their consultations without pay. This change impacted all but one of the provincial court locations:

Given that they were “already sitting with the guys and talking to them anyway,” the intake workers materialized as the most convenient figures in the court network to take on the public defender's responsibilities. Their personas as generic administrative workers, who technically lacked an adversarial affiliation, undoubtedly facilitated this devolution. The fact that the original bail template form was a CAV creation also came into play. When I asked the PAR coordinators about how they experienced their augmented responsibilities, they advised that although they felt “forced” to undertake them, at the same time, conducting these activities did not feel completely out of bounds with their positions, due to their ownership of the form. Sheila specifically advised: “The bail sheet was created at CAV. We added on to it, but you made it here.” Combined, these factors coalesced to transform the original purpose of the bail template radically and enable its metamorphosis into the global bail form.

Just as critical to the bail form's trajectory and influence on the PAR coordinator's subjectivity is its design. Both the global bail form and its predecessor possess the standard features of any administrative template. The use of a template in this context enables the distilling of complex legal responsibilities into a series of easy-to-complete administrative tasks. Fundamental to this translation are the empty boxes and blanks positioned beside remnants of the EI court's standard conditions. The use of these figures implies that completing this form could easily be done by just about anyone in the plea court network. For example, any of the routine actors in the court would know that the clause reading “Provide a copy of any consent to the programme director of __________” requires the name of the counseling provider, and that “Abstain from contacting, directly or indirectly, with __________” necessitates the name of the victim. Obscured, however, are the behind-the-scenes conversations and local knowledge required to explain the intricacies of the conditions and to secure the defendant's signature, particularly in relation to victim contact and communication. The design of the form thus suggests simplicity. In so doing, it hides the explanatory labor required to ensure the form's completion.

The generic essence of the administrative template also influences the translation of the bail variation process into a routine administrative responsibility. The listing of the court's standard bail conditions on one single, yet easily duplicated, sheet of paper enables the document to be deployed for multiple purposes. The morphing of the bail form from a memory tool into an explanatory instrument is thus not entirely surprising, given the adaptability and malleability of the template. In fact, this shift in the function of the document required nothing more than the inclusion of three blanks and some half-written text at the end of the form, which reads: “I __________, have read the above conditions, understand them and agree to follow them. Accused's Signature: __________ Date: __________.” The inclusion of these three blank spaces within the confirmation of understanding seals the form's fate as an explanatory instrument.

Finally, along with examining how additions to the form altered its use, equally important is to consider what is missing. Interestingly, unlike the referral form described earlier, the global bail form does not include a signature line for the PAR coordinator. This absence is significant, given that this document is not meant to be completed by the defendant without the guidance of the PAR coordinator. In addition, by obscuring her identity, the missing blank enables the intake worker's augmented responsibilities, allowing for the persistence of these transgressions despite the return of the public defender to the EI court network by 2013. The lack of a signature field for the form's mediator implies that the identities of the document's explicators are, to a degree, irrelevant. The ultimate impact is the rendering of the PAR coordinator and defense counsel as interchangeable figures in the EI legal assemblage.

The Global Bail Form and the Reconfiguration of the Par Coordinator

The influence of the global bail form in petrifying the defense-like responsibilities of the PAR coordinator within the plea court legal assemblage was blatant when I returned to the EI courts in 2013. The following are excerpts of conversations overheard in the plea courts in the summer of that year. In the first case, Kelly, the intake worker, explains to a defendant that his bail condition governing contact and communication with his partner will not be varied. In the second, Sheila does the same, supplementing the discussion with explanations of third-party contact and the implications of securing contact through a family court order. The third example details a conversation between Kelly, a female defendant, and her private defense counsel, while the fourth relays a conversation between Sheila and a defendant regarding the contact and parameter conditions for his bail. Note that in this last case, the Victim Witness Assistance Program, the entity enlisted with the responsibility of reaching out to complainants to determine their desires around contact, could not reach the victim in time for the defendant's court date. Though Sheila's request to the crown prosecutor with regard to the bail variation is not entirely clear, what is apparent is her usurpation of defense counsel's responsibilities.

Case 1
Defendant:	So, I can contact my wife through a third party?
Kelly:	No, not directly or indirectly—that would put you in trouble. You don't talk to her in any way at all.
Defendant:	What happens if I see her?
Kelly:	You leave. YOU. Not her. If your wife later decided she wants to talk to you, then there is a process that needs to happen, but right now, you don't talk to your wife.
Case 2
Sheila:	So [with regards to contact], if you're eating in a restaurant and she [the victim] comes in, then you have to leave. If you need to see your kids, you still can't be around her, unless the judge in the family court order says that you can have contact when picking up your kids. Or, if you don't have a family court order, then you can arrange a third party for the purposes of seeing your kids.
Case 3
Kelly:	[Looking at her brief] Okay, you're receiving a peace bond. Can you review these conditions with your client, please? [hands over the form to defense counsel]
Defense Counsel:	Okay, so if you get a family court order that says you can have contact with each other for the kids then you can have contact. Or, if you get a letter from him that says you can have contact then you can have contact.
Defendant:	Oh, so if I go to his house with this sheet [points at the bail form] then I'm allowed to be there?”
Defense Counsel:	Yep [barely listening].
Kelly:	[Jumping in] No, no, no! You have to get him to write you a letter and give it to someone else to give to you BEFORE you can go into his house.
Case 4
Sheila:	So, you have to abstain from contact with your wife and remain 500m away from where she lives, works, or is known to be.
Defendant:	The place where she is living now is close to my house.
Sheila:	Oh … do you want me to change it to 250 meters?
Defendant:	Actually, it's probably over 500 meters away so it's okay. What if we bump into each other?
Sheila:	You get up and leave. She was fearful of you and she's the victim, right? She has the right to not be in fear. So let's say you're in a restaurant and she walks in. You have to get up and leave. [Pauses] You know what? I'm going to ask the Crown if he will allow contact with your wife if she's agreeable. I don't know how anyone will find her, but I can ask [the Victim Witness Assistance Program].
	[After hearing that the Victim Witness Assistance Program could not contact the victim] I wrote that we couldn't get a hold of her [the victim]. The Crown will know what I'm talking about. The duty counsel might have to step in to ask the Crown for what I'm asking for.

Each of these conversations illustrates how far the PAR coordinators' responsibilities now deviate from their original administrative function. In contrast to the early days in the courts, where most of their conversations with defendants entailed rattling off a list of mundane questions, now the intake and referral process involves routinely explaining the intricacies of concepts such as written revocable consent, advising defendants of the consequences of breaches, and relaying their options around custody. In addition, as shown in the third example, the PAR coordinators continue to explain the bail conditions even in the immediate presence of private defense counsel. The inclusion of the global bail form into the legal assemblage thus resulted in the permanent expansion of the PAR coordinators' responsibilities, ones that persist despite the re-emergence of defense counsel and the return of the court network to its original state.

The conversations required to fill in the global bail form not only result in the PAR coordinator emulating the defense. At times, she also materializes as an amalgamation of the defense and prosecutor. This excerpt from an intake interview between Sheila and a female defendant in the summer of 2013 illustrates that the PAR coordinators not only explain the court's standard conditions when filling in the global bail form; sometimes, they independently draft conditions for the accused. In this example, Sheila is explaining the court's rules around victim contact and communication with Ms. Robins, the defendant in the case. During their conversation, she decides to amend her bail conditions based on a practice regularly used in another courthouse. The condition she adds is not an actual option on the global bail form:

Sheila:	Okay, now for contact. Just answer honestly: have the two of you had contact since all of this?
Ms. Robins:	No we haven't.
Sheila:	[Reading from a form provided by VWAP, which assesses victim preferences for contact] Well, for your new bail, you are going to need to get into alcohol counseling and PAR counseling before you can have contact with him. … Okay, I need to find out how to word this [condition].
	[Sheila calls Kelly, the regular PAR coordinator for the Westbrook courthouse] How is the Westbrook condition worded? You know how at Westbrook they [the defendants] have to start the program before they can have contact? I want to do that with someone here.
	[Sheila repeats the condition relayed by Kelly aloud] “Consent only allowed upon acceptance into alcohol counseling and continued attendance.”

Examples such as these, which occurred more than a few times in the course of my field work, indicate how the intake worker's administrative forms, combined with broader shifts to the plea court legal assemblage over time, not only compel her to perform as defense counsel, but also induce transgressions into prosecutorial terrains.

In sum, following the bail document from its moment of creation as a simple template to its current manifestation as an explanatory tool reveals how significantly paper has altered the plea courts during its fourteen-year lifespan. While the evolution of this form is undoubtedly a reflection of broader changes in the legal assemblage, the document itself exerts an effect on the circulation of knowledge between the court's administrative workers and legal professionals. In making these actors interchangeable, the bail form enables the detaching of expertise from defense counsel and moves it to the intake worker (Latour, quoted in Levi and Valverde Reference Levi and Valverde2008). The ultimate effect of this process is the collapsing of traditional adversarial, legal, and institutional boundaries in this specialized court site, despite the lack of structural basis for this meshing within this problem-solving court.

The emergence of the PAR coordinator into a hybrid prosecutor/defense figure enables the courts to function despite funding cutbacks and rising caseloads. Her persistence as this conglomerate, despite the return of the public defender to the court network, illuminates the primacy of the form in instigating, as well as perpetuating, this restructuring. Finally, as Vismann (Reference Vismann2008) points out in her analysis of the list, the bail template possesses a malleability that enables its deployment for a variety of objectives. The mere existence of a template listing the court's standard conditions eventually enabled the PAR coordinator to adopt the responsibilities of the defense counsel easily, despite the fact that the form was never meant to be used for this objective.

Peace Bonds, the Par Freeze, and the Acknowledgment Form

In recent years, the PAR coordinator's intake interview has not only morphed into a complex discussion about bail, the perils of breaching, and the legalities of amending conditions; now just as common during intake interviews are conversations about guilt, innocence, responsibility, bad relationships, abusive tactics, the types of weapons offenders used during incidents, the injuries, if any, victims sustained, and the events that instigated the violence. These topics are now routine aspects of the intake and referral process. The expansion of the coordinators' responsibilities is directly related to the introduction of the acknowledgment form, which materialized in the plea court assemblage in 2007. As noted earlier, the document is a succinct, yet highly convoluted, admission of wrongdoing that the PAR coordinators deploy in cases where prosecutors have agreed to offer defendants peace bonds, rather than the two standard noncustodial sentences that typically accompany plea deals in the courts. The central distinction between the peace bond cases and the standard EI ones is the guilty plea; defendants receiving peace bonds are not required to plead guilty to their offenses prior to enrolling in PAR counseling. In addition, the prosecutors will drop their charges upon successful completion of a batterer's program. The acknowledgment form essentially acts as a stand-in for the guilty plea, which all the “peace bond guys” are now required to sign in order to register for counseling.

Mutiny in the Courts: The Par Freeze

The acknowledgment form evolved as a panacea to the ongoing conflicts between PAR counselors and crown prosecutors over the symbolic and practical significance of the guilty plea in the EI court. When the courts first evolved, both groups, along with the CAV, agreed that pleas of guilt should always be a precondition for entering into the counseling program. The guideline stemmed from the court's philosophical emphasis on offender accountability, which the CAV and its co-organizers felt could be accomplished only by ensuring that all defendants receive some form of criminal record following the resolution of their cases. More significantly, for the PAR counselors, the guilty plea was essential to the process of reforming abusers and ensuring they accepted responsibility for their abusive behavior. Counselors relied on their admissions of guilt made in court as leverage when offenders denied wrongdoing in their counseling sessions.

For nearly a decade, the plea courts operated in accordance with their original principles. However, these guidelines began to crumble as organizational constraints and broader global processes forced prosecutors to compromise their standards. According to the PAR coordinators, the peace bond plea deals were a direct result of the altered significance of the conditional discharge post 9-11. The conditional discharge, a finding of guilt that remains on an offender's record for two years, at one point had been the most lenient of the two standard sentences given in the plea courts. Since it can ultimately be erased, the sentence is technically not a criminal conviction. In the years following 9-11 and the war on terrorism, however, the consequences of the conditional discharge began to change. The increased securitization of borders prevented any individual found guilty of a criminal offense from traveling from Canada to the United States. Sheila elaborated on the problem during her interview:

The restrictions conditional discharges imposed on civil liberties increasingly hindered the abilities of prosecutors to secure plea deals in the EI courts, as the 9-11 defense exerted a ripple effect and eventually came to be used in cases where defendants did not regularly travel for work or cross borders. The difficulties associated with securing deals magnified in cases where victims did not want to pursue charges. Consequently, when confronted with these obstacles, prosecutors capitulated and began to offer defendants peace bonds in exchange for their participation in the counseling program. From their perspectives, advised Sheila, “something was better than nothing.”

While the peace bond materialized as a solution for prosecutors, these cases wreaked havoc in the group counseling sessions. Without the guilty plea for leverage, program providers were unable to get the “peace bond guys,” as they are known in the local vernacular, to accept responsibility for their abusive behavior. Given the emphasis on accountability in the programs, the counselors viewed therapeutic interventions with this group of offenders as waste of time. According to Kelly:

Along with the frustrations associated with overcoming abuser denial, the influx of the peace bond defendants raised significant problems in the group counseling sessions as word spread that some received better deals from the courts than others. These interactions generated significant feelings of injustice within the batterer's programs, particularly in those instances where peace bond offenders committed far more severe acts of abuse than those receiving stiffer sentences. The PAR counselors were left to allay and contain these disagreements.

The conflicts between the prosecutors and the PAR providers ultimately culminated in a boycott of the courts by the counseling agencies known as the PAR freeze. As Sheila explained:

All eleven PAR providers, under the leadership of the CAV, united in their decisions to refrain from accepting referrals from the plea courts until the problem was resolved. The boycott effectively shut down all of the cities' EI courts for almost six weeks. Eventually, the CAV requested representatives from the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General to intervene and to develop a solution that could satisfy the concerns of all those involved. In response, the provincial government developed the acknowledgment form.

Standardizing Wrongdoing: The Acknowledgment Form

The acknowledgment form offers a template for an admission of wrongdoing that all peace bond defendants are required to sign before they enroll in a PAR program. As a standardized confession, the document compels offenders to admit that they “might” have engaged in behavior that could be considered abusive and criminal. The form offers users a selection of four, pregiven categories that they can select from to convey the events that transpired when the police charged them with their crimes. Completing the form entails filling in four blanks and checking the appropriate box. The following is a reproduction of the content of the form:

Peace bond offenders must determine which box to check based on the police synopsis of the victim's statement, which serves as the basis for the criminal charge. Regardless of which option they select, by signing the form, they all agree to the bare minimum of guiltiness required to enroll in a PAR program: an incontrovertible declaration that they made their partners feel unsafe. Defendants then sign and date the form to confirm their agreement with and understanding of its contents. Failure to proceed with the document will result in their rejection from the intake and referral process and, ultimately, the EI court. The PAR coordinators possess the discretion to halt the intake interview and return the case to the crown prosecutor if they experience significant resistance from defendants.

The acknowledgment form exerts two significant effects on the plea court assemblage that are crucial for its continued operation. The document generates institutional consensus by enabling prosecutors to continue with their plea bargaining practices, while also offering the PAR providers a quasilegal simulation of a formal guilty plea that they can use for the purposes of counseling. The ultimate result is the formation of a hybrid state of guilt, which rests somewhere in between guilt and innocence, and possesses a veneer of official law, despite having no legal bearing at all. Although the form is a confession to nothing beyond instilling fear, the pseudo state of guilt it produces is fundamental to the maintenance of harmony in the EI courts and the community partnerships that fuel the prosecution process.

“You're Not Making it Past My Screen”: The Par Coordinator as a Prosecutorial Counselor

As a standardized template for an admission of wrongdoing, the acknowledgment form is designed to make the process of extracting the peace bond defendant's confession as easy, efficient, and quick as possible. As is the case with the bail forms examined earlier, the document's technologies, specifically the empty boxes and blanks, are meant to simplify activities for the form filler. However, observations of the form-filling process, particularly what PAR coordinators need to do and say to get offenders to agree to the form's content, reveal the struggles and negotiations they consistently encounter when trying to procure these acknowledgments. The following are excerpts of intake interviews with several different peace bond defendants documented in the summer of 2013. Each of these examples provides a snapshot of how the PAR coordinators introduce and explain the acknowledgment form during the referral process. They also illustrate the resistance the workers regularly encounter when trying to convince defendants to check the appropriate box, a task that appears so simple, yet in reality requires significant effort, displays of authority, and at times, a certain degree of territorial marking:

Case 1
Sheila:	You won't be pleading guilty in the court, but everyone has to sign this form to get into the agency. You have to take some responsibility. … You don't have to say you did exactly what she said, but you have to say that you at least acted in a way that wasn't right.
Defendant:	I didn't do anything though. My wife is the crazy one in this.
Sheila:	Okay, I'm not saying that your wife is perfect in this, but you have to be able to recognize that you did something wrong at least, even if “she started it” or whatever. When you are with someone for a really long time, you start to take on each other's habits. … So, let's say in arguments you never used to yell, but she did. You will probably notice that, over time, you started to be louder like her. Or, let's say that if you bumped into her by accident, you would always say you're sorry. But when she does it, she never does. You probably stopped saying sorry. Those are just the little things, but they will eventually escalate.
	[Sheila then refers to the police synopsis as the defendant continues to resist] This report tells me that this [the violence] has been going on for quite some time. So, after 1, 2, 3 … 10 times, it starts to feel acceptable to be physical. There's obviously something keeping you guys wanting to be together, and even if this relationship ends, you will be with someone in the future again, and you don't want this type of relationship again.
	You have to learn your lesson of how to recognize your wrongdoing in a situation. If you put something in the oven and then you put your hand in to get it out without putting the glove on, and then blame your burn on the stove, that doesn't make much sense. You have to take responsibility for not putting the glove on.
Defendant's Lawyer:	Yeah, I can explain all of this to him.
Sheila:	[Annoyed] No, I have to make sure he's suitable for the program.
Defendant's Lawyer:	Well, I've never seen another PAR worker do this before.
Kelly:	We ALL do it when we have someone we need to make sure can actually be suitable for the program.
Sheila:	I am the person who screens these cases. I don't want to waste my agency's time, or my time.
Case 2
Sheila:	You don't have to admit to any of the allegations here, but to go to the program, you have to acknowledge that something occurred. So, it [the form] is not saying [the incident] is all your fault, but it's not saying that it's all her fault either. You have to acknowledge that something happened on the day to make her scared. … It's not even for the court; it's for the agency only.
Defendant's Interpreter:	He's saying he didn't do anything.
Sheila:	[Retrieves and reads from the police synopsis] Were you in an argument with your wife about medication? Okay, after reading this synopsis, for sure something happened.
	I'm not trying to get into whether you were aggressive on this or not. My interest is to prepare you for the program by telling you that you cannot stay fixed on [the fact that you are] “not pleading guilty.”… How long have you been married? Twenty-five years? You didn't get married to be unhappy. You are going to this program to learn new skills to change your behavior and then bring those skills home to share with your wife. And you need to pass this program to be able to get your charges withdrawn.
Defendant's Interpreter:	He wants a copy of the form.
Sheila:	No! It's not for the court. It's for the agency only.
	[The defendant signs the form] I feel like I'm forcing him. … Tell him he can go to trial or he can adjourn his matter.
Defendant's Interpreter:	He doesn't want to go to trial.
Sheila:	[Proceeding with the intake and the bail form, which the defendant also resists] Are you preparing to breach your conditions? Follow the rules and nothing will happen! Let me ask you a question: She has the injuries, right? And you don't. And she wants contact with you. And you don't? And she gets left to support the kids. An outside professional had to call the police because she didn't want to call. It appears to me that you are withdrawing yourself to punish her. If that's the case, I'm not signing you up for my program. I'm supposed to sign people up to be successful.
	[Crown prosecutor enters the room.]
	[Addressing the prosecutor] Sorry, this one is not going to work.
Prosecutor:	Okay. Thanks. [Leaves room]
Sheila:	[Addressing the defendant] There is no responsibility here. In my experience, people who resist this much will not be successful. Clearly, you don't care at all about your partner. Clearly, any of the solutions you're looking for are for yourself—your citizenship, your charges withdrawn. This is not for her.
Defendant's Interpreter:	He is saying, “If I'm not suitable for the program they will just send me back to the court. So, who cares?”
Sheila:	Because I am the person who screens these cases and you're not making it past my screen. Go think about it and find something in this incident that was your fault. [Defendant continues to argue with her; Sheila advises she will adjourn the matter] Come back next week with something you can take responsibility for.
Case 3
Defendant:	I was telling the lady in there [duty counsel] that I'm not guilty. I didn't hit her. I just approached her when I was mad because she wouldn't let me see my kid because I was late dropping him off the last time.
Sheila:	[Reading the synopsis] Okay. These programs are for people who are pleading guilty. I will try to find a way to get you in through an acknowledgment so you can do the program and get a peace bond. So would you say you were in her space? Did you do something wrong? Could she have been scared?
	[Defendant answers “yes” to all of the questions and signs the form]

Each of these cases exemplifies the amalgamated prosecutor/counselor figure the PAR coordinators are forced to adopt when trying to persuade offenders to sign their acknowledgment forms. To get peace bond offenders to admit that they, at the very least, triggered fear in their partners, the intake workers engage in an array of therapeutic tactics that mimic the strategies counselors routinely use when running their programs. Lectures on the importance of acquiring new relationship skills, realizing the effects of abusive behavior on their partners, and overcoming denial are now run of the mill during the EI court intake session. The coordinators, like the counselors, use the facts of the case to support their assessments of defendants as potentially abusive and to encourage their compliance with program rules.

Along with turning the intake process into a therapy session, the acknowledgment form also transforms the interview into somewhat of a mini-trial. Though not a formal guilty plea, the quasilegal state of guiltiness the document produces still requires defendants to admit to some of the evidence presented in the case. To seal the peace bond deals, the intake workers are compelled to emulate and speak like prosecutors. Positioning themselves as the screeners of the program, they emphasize their authority and capacity to reject and accept cases. They frequently reference evidence and case facts to justify their decisions to either allow or prevent defendants from proceeding through the courts with the promise of a peace bond. At times, they also use their positions to suggest cases for possible peace bond deals that prosecutors did not even originally consider during their initial screens. These examples indicate the significance of the acknowledgment form in reconfiguring the roles, responsibilities, and subjectivities of the intake workers. In explicating the document, the coordinators literally speak themselves into existence as prosecutors when peace bond defendants resist admitting wrongdoing, as well as counselors when their interactions require far more therapeutic tactics of persuasion.

Conclusion

Examining the effects of documents on legal assemblages comprised of community-based and criminal justice entities, who possess, at times, incompatible interests and philosophical principles on how best to manage the problem of domestic violence, is a logical step; existing theorizations on the work of paper alert us to its significance in coordinating consensus (Smith Reference Smith1984), mollifying disagreements (Riles Reference Riles and Riles2006a), governing social life (Hull Reference Hull2012b), and producing uniformity through “making actors interchangeable” (Heimer Reference Heimer and Riles2006, 96). These effects are not only achieved through written content, but also through objects as minor as punctuation marks (Riles Reference Riles and Riles2006a). Additionally, as Vismann (Reference Vismann2008) shows, administrative templates are key to understanding a genealogy of law, particularly in relation to their integral role in generating truth, the state, and the subject.

Similarly, this discussion illuminates how administrative forms, as well as objects as miniscule as empty boxes and blank spaces, possess the capacity to propel a specialized domestic violence plea court through a variety of cutbacks and conflicts. The design of the global bail and acknowledgment forms relies on blanks and boxes to simplify and accelerate the processes of explaining bail conditions and securing admissions of wrongdoing from defendants. In so doing, the documents translate court responsibilities typically conducted by legal experts and adversaries into administrative duties to be undertaken by a single figure in the court network. The ultimate effect of the forms in this legal assemblage is the production of hybrids and amalgamations that become essential to the continued functioning of the plea courts.

The conglomerates that arise and persist through the global bail form and acknowledgment form illuminate the privileging of administrative concerns, institutional harmony, and bureaucratic needs for standardization over moral and philosophical debates about guilt and innocence, and right and wrong, that are assumed to inform legal decision making. The liminal, quasilegal state of guilt generated by the acknowledgment form resolves the differences between prosecutors and counselors by allowing both to pursue their own institutional interests. As the chameleon of the legal assemblage, the PAR coordinator materializes as a figure with the abilities to morph consistently in congruence with the needs of the network, shape shifting to appear as prosecutor, counselor, or defense attorney as conflicts and funding cuts require. Ultimately, her documents produce and fix her as a quasilegal figure who simultaneously drafts bail conditions, screens cases, extracts confessions, reviews evidence, and explains the intricacies of the court's standard conditions, despite the fact that she is technically only required to act as the plea court's form filler. While the PAR coordinators do attempt use their gate-keeping function to bar defendants from counseling who appear to them to be in total denial of responsibility for their abusive behavior, ultimately, practical and administrative concerns dictate courses of action. The courts' reliance on standardized admissions of wrongdoing to proceed with cases and keep the courts operational prove to be far more effective than traditional legal constructs of guilt and the guilty mind when resolving cases.

This analysis of administrative forms and their effects on the prosecution of domestic violence affirms existing accounts that urge us to look at documents as far more than mere receptacles for storing information. Doing so enables examinations of how state and legal power are brought to life largely through mundane bureaucratic interactions, rather than singular ideological agendas. A form-led analysis spotlights the contradictions, messiness, and disjointedness that transpire behind the scenes of law and the significance of templates in bridging these divides. In illuminating their consensus-generating effects, constitutive accounts underscore the significance of documents in producing illusions of unity within realms of state and penal power. Through showing how varying processes and interests become pieced together, often in an ad hoc way, such analyses of forms reaffirm theorizations of “the state” that aim to disassemble the unity the word connotes (Sharma Reference Sharma2008).

Finally, while this account predominately focuses on how documents reconfigure the subjectivities of the form fillers, rather than the documented, the discussion also offers insight into the fates of plea court defendants as they proceed through the specialized prosecution process. The cookie-cutter understanding of wrongdoing that materializes from the use of the acknowledgment form provides certain defendants with a less punitive option to prosecute their cases than when the EI courts first began. Although the peace bond deals did precede the use of the form within this court, the deployment of a template ultimately standardized and secured the provision of these plea bargains. In this sense, the incorporation of the acknowledgment form suggests a lightening of punishment, though one fueled by practical and administrative concerns, rather than a therapeutic logic of care. If we examine the outcomes of peace bond cases, however, in light of the likelihood of case dismissals and acquittals, if the matter went to trial, the notion that the peace bond defendants receive better deals is questionable. Seen in this way, the acknowledgement form can be viewed as a critical technique of penal power, one that enables control without conviction (Kohler-Hausmann Reference Kohler‐Hausmann2013). The document is thus emblematic of strategies employed within the context of misdemeanor justice, where overwhelming caseloads and anxieties over long adjournments ultimately override moral questions and dictate the prosecution of cases.