Law Enforcement-Juvenile Court Relations: The Impact on Decision Making

Studies ofjuvenile court decision making have tended to focus on the role played in the dispositional process by social-biographical attributes of the juvenile and the circumstances surrounding the offense. Such inquiries have produced conflicting results and no clear understanding of the determinants of juvenile court decision making. Examination of the literature on complex organizations and of descriptive studies of the juvenile court suggest that agencies which comprise the court 's task environment may have a significant impact on the dispositions of the court. A primary component of the juvenile court's task environment is the law enforcement community which tends to pressure the court for dispositions designed to control the behavior ofjuveniles in the community. To assess the influence of law enforcement agencies on the decision making of the juvenile court, the dispositions made by a main office and two satellite offices of a juvenile court in a rural western state were analyzed. The results indicate that juveniles handled in the two satellite offices received more severe types of dispositions and longer periods of time on the disposition ofprobation than did their counterparts in the main office of the court. Examination of the interview and observational data gathered in the three offices of the court indicated that police-court relations were a primary determinant of the differential patterns of decision making which were evident. The implications of these findings for further research on juvenile court decision making are discussed.