Off School, In Court: An Experimental and Psychiatric Investigation of Severe School Attendance Problems

• NCJ Number: 114615
• Author(s): I Berg; I Brown; R Hullin
• Date Published: 1988
• Length: 142 pages
• Sponsoring Agency: Nuffield Foundation; Home Office Research Unit
• Sale Source: Springer-Verlag
• Publication Type: Research (Applied/Empirical)
• Language: English
• Country: United Kingdom
• Note: Part of the series entitled 'Research in Criminology.'

Annotation

The first randomly controlled trial carried out by Leeds (England) juvenile court magistrates compared 51 children put on supervision orders with 46 dealt with by the adjournment procedure.

Abstract

The study began in 1975 and lasted approximately one year. The children studied had a mean age of 13 years. In the six months following their first court appearance because of truancy, the adjourned group (monitoring through repeated court appearances without issued orders) attended school more often and committed fewer criminal offenses than the supervised group. Apparently no particular subgroup would have responded sufficiently well to a supervision order to justify continuing its use. The study concluded that the adjournment procedure should be used routinely for virtually all children taken to juvenile court for truancy. Juvenile court magistrates in Leeds generally stopped using supervision orders following this experiment and adopted the adjournment procedure as the standard way of dealing with truants brought before the court. This policy has been effective in changing truancy patterns. Chapter references, author index, subject index.