Juvenile and Police

Juvenile and Police

Introduction

The children were described as our future, our greatest resource, and our hopes for a better future (Bishop 2000). For many Americans, though, children invoke fear. They represent violence, part of the community does not have enough self-control and devoid of ethics and morality, and the rejection of the family to instill traditional values - chief among which is the value of human life and respect for others.

Fear of crime, especially random violence by young Americans is one of the biggest problems facing the country. He serves as the motivation for countless people to change their lifestyles, take self-defense classes, installing home security systems, and carry guns for protection (Kurlychek 2004). In addition, the fear of crime influenced politicians and ordinary people to take the position that a conservative justice system that seeks to punish and deter, holds the most promise in reducing juvenile crime. Waiver of juveniles to criminal (i.e., adult) court and the introduction of criminal sanctions, according to conservative positions, are effective ways for society to express their outrage to the crime "out of control" youth and to calm his desire of revenge.

Others, however, argue that treating juveniles as adults is going too far. Although many of these juveniles are incarcerated for their crimes, which the law allows, they are often easy victims of homosexual rape and other forms of violence in the hands of hardened criminal adults.

The juvenile justice system

The juvenile justice system was founded on the idea that decision making is a case-by-case endeavor in the best interests of the child. This system is characterized by informal processes, diversion, and the court-ordered involvement of parents in the lives of their children. Much of the juvenile justice discourse contends that most youth can be treated and supervised in the community but that some individual circumstances and community factors may necessitate that youth be supervised at more intensive levels of probation. Intensive probation supervision includes smaller caseloads, more individualized client attention, and in some jurisdictions, probation officers have used a neighborhood-based team approach with police officers and community service providers.

Juvenile probation

The multiple member team approach of community supervision necessitates that juvenile probation is involved in a wide array of partnerships, networking with community agencies, and highly discretionary decision making. At the same time, juvenile probation officers (JPOs) have a great deal of professional autonomy, even within agency guidelines defining officer-client interactions and responses to technical violations. In this article, we review the literature on police-probation partnerships, and make the case that these partnerships, like many forms of intensive community supervision, are consistent with characteristics of a loosely coupled system. A loosely coupled system will first be defined and distinguished from a tightly coupled system. The extent to which the organizational structure and function of the probation-police partnership is a loosely coupled system will be measured and implications discussed. Loose coupling is generally used to describe one or more organizations.

In a loosely coupled system, the organization is decentralized, but occupational ...