Recent Book: Young Offenders, Controlling Delinquents
| Published date | 01 January 1969 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X6904200113 |
| Author | Douglas Gibson |
| Date | 01 January 1969 |
| Subject Matter | Recent Book |
account
of
the multifarious campaigns
which the Communists
carryon
relentlessly against the way of life
and the national freedom of all who
are not Communists an indisputable
claim on the attention of those who are
being so incessantly and insidiously
undermined.
It
enables us to measure
the malice and brutality by which the
war is waged and it makes nonsense of
the wishful thinking to which Western
countries are so prone in their dealings
with the Communist powers. Means
determine ends: the means by which
the Communist seeks to bring about
his Utopia, set out as they are in this
book, indicate only too clearly what
the nature of that Utopia would be.
CONSERVATOR.
YOUNG
OFFENDERS
STANTON
WHEELER
(Editor): Controlling Delinquents.
John
Wiley and Son. 75s.
This volume
of
American studies,
employing the perspectives of several
standpoints within the social sciences,
illustrates the outcome of some of the
deliberations of the President's Com-
mittee on Juvenile Delinquency and
YouthCrime which greatly encouraged
the 1961 Federal Act to be passed to
assist local communities in developing
more effective delinquency prevention
and control programmes. As a first
step, a series ofprojects were instigated
on the broad theme of present practices
in the control of delinquents. This
book reports 11 of these studies in a
careful and responsible academic
manner, and in so doing seems to high-
light the familiar problem of the sort
of contribution to the work of prac-
titioners and policy makers
that
such
research can make.
On the basis of this volume there is
a good case to argue, for it avoids the
highly speculative and often abstruse
arguments of causative theories of
juvenile delinquency, and deals with
much more practical matters.
It
is
important to know
that
clients of
social work agencies may need legal
advice at least as much as they need
psychiatric and casework treatment,
and
that
Judges who
adopt
the modern
juvenile court philosophy appear to
commit more youths to institutions
than
do those operating with a more
formal and legalistic judicial view.
But, more often, any generalizations
from the evidence presented must be
January 1969
very tentative.
The first study compares two large
American police departments to dis-
cover whether a high level of
"pro-
fessionalism" makes any difference
to the handling of juvenile offenders
and the evidence suggests
that
"at
least in this case aprofessionalized
police department tends to expose a
higher proportion of juveniles to the
possibility of court action" (my italics).
Another study suggests how the
separate agencies (police, courts, pro-
bation officers and social workers)
can easily confuse the delinquent
owing to the lack of communication
between and within agencies.
That
is
to say, each occupational group, and
even every individual member, have
their own particular ideologies which
tend to prevent the development of
rationality in taking decisions. These
illustrations indicate
that
American
research can raise important questions
for us, in
our
own situation, but it is
absolutely vital to realize that these
findings must be placed within the
context of the different organizations
and underlying philosophies of British
control agencies.
Lloyd E. Ohlin in the foreword
sees this present work as particularly
useful as teaching material, and if one
manages to overcome a
too
familiar
reluctance to tackle asubstantial
American volume, then it will probably
succeed in this objective.
DOUGLAS
GIBSON
21
To continue reading
Request your trial