Scope of Court Services - Whether the Court Should Be Responsible for Probation and Detention (From Juvenile Justice Standards Symposium, P 56-119, 1979 - See NCJ-76912)

• NCJ Number: 76914
• Author(s): B D Hege
• Date Published: 1979
• Length: 64 pages
• Publication Format: Document
• Publication Type: Conference Material
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America
• Note: This document is available on microfiche under NCJ 76912.

Annotation

A symposium presentation and subsequent discussion examine the issue of whether the juvenile court should be responsible for probation and detention, with emphasis on three proposed sets of standards on the subject.

Abstract

The proposed standards include those of the Joint Commission of the Institute for Judicial Administration and the American Bar Association (IJA/ABA), the National Advisory Committee for Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (NAC), and the Task Force on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (Task Force). The issue of the scope of court services is related to the broader controversy between advocates of the parens patriae doctrine and advocates of the due process approach to the administration of the juvenile justice system. Arguments against judicial administration of intake, predisposition investigation, and probation services have been based on the belief that the present system denies the child to a fair and impartial judge, because the judge's employee does the intake and investigation and because the information obtained is communicated freely and informally between judges and probation officers. The IJA/ABA and Task Force standards clearly favor executive administration of these functions, while the NAC standards are somewhat more equivocal. On the issue of whether these services should be administered locally or as part of a statewide system, all three sets of standards favor statewide, highly decentralized systems. Both the IJA/ABA and NAC standards favor specialization of all three functions, while the Task Force standards recommend that intake and predisposition investigation should be performed by the same individuals, since similar skills are required. All the standards appear to favor executive branch control for the administration of detention programs and centralized State control of juvenile correctional facilities. Philosophical implications and implementation issues presented by the standards are explored. The subsequent discussion revealed sharp disagreement on several points.