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23 Crime & Delinquency 1 (1977)

handle is hein.journals/cadq23 and id is 1 raw text is: January 1977 Vol. 23, No. 1 CRIME DELINQUENCY A PUBLICATION OF THE NATIONAL COUNCIL ON CRIME AND DELINQUENCY The Juvenile Court's Search for Identity and Responsibility* H. TED RUBIN Assistant Executive Director, Institute for Court Management, Denver, Colo.; judge, Denver juvenile Court, 1965-71 Like most American institutions, the juvenile court has been pressed into re-assessing its purpose and role. Its longstanding preference to be largely unencumbered by legal constraints and its historic practice of seeking to be all things to all children have impeded the clarity of the redefinition of what it should be doing and how it should be doing it. This paper examines contemporary juvenile court practices and finds them faulty as to law and lawyer representation and disproportionately concerned with protecting status offenders from themselves. Paternalism has compromised law, and excessive optimism has compromised a more effective work product. While intake, detention screening, detention alternatives, and decentralized probation services expand usefully, con- cern for improved juvenile court administration has lagged. The article urges a rigorous adherence to legal procedures. Defense counsel representation should be a mandatory requirement. The use of referees as hearing officers-symbolic of the inferior status of this court in the judicial and public mind-should be ended. jurisdiction over status offenders should be repealed, diversion expanded, wide-ranging discre- tion narrowed, the doctrine of the least restrictive alternative promulgated, and the change-agent community role of the judge and probation staff extended. The court's increased interest in furthering the accountability of collaborative agency services with court clientele is supported. *Adapted from the opening address at the agement, Snowmass-at-Aspen, Colo., Sept. 20, Advanced Institute for Juvenile justice Man- 1975. 1

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