© British Association of Social Workers
Decision Making and Social Inquiry Reports in One Juvenile Court
Joy Mott is a Principal Research Officer at the Home Office Research Unit. She deals mainly with research on offending by juveniles.
Summary
In 1965 it was already the practice of this juvenile court to require the preparation of pretrial social inquiry reports. The study examined the effects of particular types of information, including the probation officers' advice, on the court's disposal decisions. For the majority of cases the Bench and the probation officers, in terms of their advice in the social inquiry reports, agreed on the disposal that was ‘obviously’ the most suitable for a particular offender, while in a substantial minority of cases the Bench ‘deferred’ to the advice offered and rejected the advice in less than 10% of cases. The magistrates indicated that the offenders' home background, followed by the seriousness of their offences, were the two most important factors they took into account in arriving at their disposal decisions. In spite of the close agreement between the magistrates and the probation officers on the most suitable disposals for particular offenders, the effectiveness of the disposals, measured by the proportions of offenders reconvicted during the five years following the disposals, was no better than expected. The statistical association between the measure of the offenders' home background (based mainly on the content of the social inquiry report) and the likelihood of reconviction was low enough to question the relevance of this kind of information for the selection of effective juvenile court disposals.