NCJ Number
70265
Journal
Ideology and Consciousness Issue: 5 Dated: (1979) Pages: 125-135
Date Published
1979
Length
11 pages
Annotation
This note addresses the competition between the criminal court aspects and the social welfare aspects of the juvenile courts in Britain as focused in the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act.
Abstract
The Children and Young Persons Act has been criticized for its failure to deal adequately with juvenile delinquency. For many, the 1969 act represents a lost opportunity for a major triumph for the welfare approach to juveniles in trouble. For others, the Act represents in its effects precisely the disastrous implications of such an approach. Yet, the act does represent a partial attempt at the legislative systemization and extension of the field of social work, preventive intervention, and correction. First, a reduction of the area over which a criminal jurisdiction could be exercised by the juvenile court is proposed, together with a reorganization of provisions for sentencing and disposal for those who are subject to criminal proceedings. Custodial provisions are to be unified, and magistrates are to simply make a 'care order' for the local authorities to administrate. These changes are linked to a consequent promotion of the role and power of social work intervention. What remains problematic is how fully the social workers' Social Enquiry Report will be used by the court in its determination of judgment and case disposal. Yet, overall, the 1969 Act outlines a system in which social workers and magistrates collaborate within a larger field of an individualizing and normalizing intervention of surveillance, prevention, and correction which is centrally focused on the family, on retaining links between children in care and their families, on keeping children out of custodial care, and also, extending the grounds on which a local authority can assume parental rights. Thus, the act envisages an alliance between agencies in which the family is part of a grand social alliance and dispersed social services are unified into a single local authority social serivce department. Three notes are provided.