Mental Attitudes of Adults in a Juvenile Court

Abstract

There is a tendency in our thinking to invest a movement or an institution with an inherent value that is independent of its actual operation. We like to do this about such institutions as the school and the home and the church. In the last few years there has been a marked tendency to do this about child guidance clinics and there has certainly been this tendency in regard to the Juvenile Court. There is some justification for this tendency to ascribe to an institution an inherent value. They all carry with them policies and traditions and experiences which act as guides to a succession of adults whose attitudes are more or less predetermined and set, not entirely by their own experience, but very largely by the accumulative experience of the court that has been translated into tradition and policy. The Juvenile Court was started largely as a humanitarian venture. It was a recognition that the formal and inelastic procedure of the traditional court room was poorly suited to the handling of the delinquent child. Children were to be protected from associating with adult criminals, and this was conceived as one way to bring this about. It was an important step toward the handling of children as individuals and considering more than just the delinquent acts that brought them to court. The court was to be regarded as the protector rather than the punisher of childhood and was to give this protection when other sources had broken down or had become inadequate. Gradually there evolved as a part of the court the opportunity for case work on the individual through the medium of probation. Here there has been theory and experience helpful in giving an inherent value to the concept of a children's court and it has been influential in shaping the mental attitudes of those who administer the theory and add to the court's experience and tradition. But there has been a tendency to fall back on his inherent value as a justification of all that went on in the court. This has been accentuated by the vast hopes that centered around it in its earlier days when it was looked upon as a panacea for dealing with the problem child and there was the desire to turn over to them all matters dealing with those children, when intervention was necessary.