Becoming Delinquent by Peter G. Garabedian Don C. Gibbons

Author:Peter G. Garabedian, Don C. Gibbons [Peter G. Garabedian, Don C. Gibbons]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781351327862
Google: 9fhADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-11-30T03:32:47+00:00

Judicious Nonintervention

The aims of preventing delinquency and the expectation of definitively treating a profusion of child and parental problems have laid an impossible burden upon the juvenile court, and they may be seriously considered to have no proper part in its philosophy. If there is a defensible philosophy for the juvenile court it is one of judicious nonintervention. It is properly an agency of last resort for children, holding to a doctrine analogous to that of appeal courts which require that all other remedies be exhausted before a case will be considered. This means that problems accepted for action by the juvenile court will be demonstrably serious by testable evidence ordinarily distinguished by a history of repeated failures at solutions by parents, relatives, schools, and community agencies. The model should be derived from the conservative English and Canadian juvenile courts, which in contrast to the American, receive relatively few cases.

This statement of juvenile court philosophy rests upon the following several propositions:

1. Since the powers of the juvenile court are extraordinary, properly it should deal with extraordinary cases.

2. Large numbers of cases defeat the purposes of the juvenile court by leading to bureaucratic procedures antithetical to individualized treatment (guidance).

3. The juvenile court is primarily a court of law and must accept limitations imposed by the inapplicability of rule and remedy to many important phases of human conduct and to some serious wrongs. Law operates by punishment, injunction against specific acts, specific redress, and substitutional redress. It cannot by such means make a father good, a mother moral, a child obedient, or a youth respectful of authority.

4. When the juvenile court goes beyond legal remedies it must resort to administrative agents, or itself become such an agency, which produces conflicts and confusion of values and objectives. Furthermore, it remains problematical whether child and parental problems can be solved by administrative means.

It may be protested that the conception of the juvenile court adumbrated here is so narrow as to emasculate it or take away any distinctive purpose. However, if it can be accepted that many acts termed delinquent in reality are not equatable with adult crimes, and that many situations called dangerous for youth on close examination turn out to be functions of moral indignation by persons and groups who, to paraphrase Maitland, “Screw up standards of reasonable ethical propriety to unreasonable heights,” then organized nonintervention by the juvenile court assumes a definite protective function for youth. It has become equally or more important to protect children from unanticipated and unwanted consequences of organized movements, programs and services in their behalf than from the unorganized, adventitious “evils” which gave birth to the juvenile court. America no longer has any significant number of Fa-gans, exploiters of child labor, sweatshops, open saloons, houses of prostitution, street trades, an immoral servant class, cruel immigrant fathers, traveling carnivals and circuses, unregulated racetracks, open gambling, nor professional crime as it once existed. The battles for compulsory education have long since been won and technological change has eliminated child labor—perhaps too well.

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