PRE-COURT DECISION-MAKING IN JUVENILE JUSTICE

Abstract

The Northampton Juvenile Liaison Bureau has as its principal objective the diversion of young offenders from criminal prosecution. Utilizing their own direct observation, the authors examine both the 'diversion' process and the underlying arguments. They report that the boundaries of prosecution are indeed being pushed back, but conclude that the Bureau's stance is open to criticism in that little help is offered to the families of these young offenders, while prosecution decisions, taken in private, fail to reflect the wishes of either parents or victims. I Juvenile Liaison Bureaus (JLBs) are hybrid organizations, drawing their staff, on secondment, from a variety of services, including probation, education, youth work, local authority social services, and the police. The nomenclature and certain organizational features vary between different centres. But what these pre-court decision-making bodies have in common, apart from their multi-agency base, is the objective of diverting young offenders from criminal prosecution, and indeed from most other forms of what is cryptically termed 'formal intervention'. They believe that the great majority of young people will grow out of their offending without need for court appearances and without assistance from statutory welfare agencies. The introduction of the JLBs has raised many fascinating issues, which for us were highlighted in the course of a visit, in January 1986, to the Northampton Bureau. We subsequently undertook a Home Office-sponsored study of victim-offender mediation and reparation, in the course of which we spent several weeks at the Northampton Bureau, observing their practice. Although this article is based on our knowledge of that agency, many of the issues which we address are common to other pre-prosecution, multi-agency teams. The Northampton JLB was created in 1984. The full staff complement comprises a director, a social worker, a probation officer, two police constables, a youth worker, and a teacher, plus an administrator and a secretary. Although financed by their parent agencies, the staff are directly accountable to the director, who is in turn accountable to a management committee. The Bureau's case-load arises directly from juvenile offending, it being deliberate policy to avoid work in areas that are 'near relatives of delinquency, for example, truancy, disruptive behaviour at home and at school, absconding and family problems' * The authors are, respectively, Research Fellow in the Faculty of Law, University ofBristol; Research Assistant in the Department of Social Administration, University of Bristol; and Lecturer in the Department of Social Administration, University ofBristol. We are grateful to the staff of the Northampton Bureau for allowing us to observe their practice and for adjusting work patterns so that we could make the best possible use of our time with them. The JLB's practice is continuing to evolve and, in some respects, may now differ materially from that which is described here. Thanks are also due to the Home Office, who paid for the original research, and to the Nuffield Foundation, which provided Gwynn Davis with additional funds for writing purposes, including the drafting of this article.