About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

34 Fed. Probation 12 (1970)
The Professional and the Volunteer in Probation: An Emerging Relationship

handle is hein.journals/fedpro34 and id is 104 raw text is: The Professional and the Volunteer in Probation: An Emerging Relationship BY IVAN H. SCHEIER, PH.D. Director, National Information Center on Volunteers in Courts, Boulder County Juvenile Court, Boulder, Colorado ROBATION began with volunteers; some be- lieve it will end with them, with volunteer probation counselors, tutors, foster parents, office workers, and the like. However that is taken, the early volunteers were honorably dis- charged as soon as we could pay people, and the pendulum swung hard toward paid professionals in the first five decades of this century. Today the pendulum swings back toward volunteers-but with a difference. Where first probation was all volunteer and later virtually all paid professional, today it is both, and both are here to stay. Probation will never again be all volunteer. But neither will it ever again be all paid professional. Therefore, the problem of modern volunteerism differs crucially from the problem of early volun- teerism in corrections, for it becomes an issue of relationship between volunteer and paid profes- sional, a problem of defining optimum roles for each in a productive probation partnership. John Augustus, as probation's founding father, in- corporated volunteer and probation officer in one body; just so, we must learn to incorporate in the body of probation, both volunteer and paid professional. As in any new marriage, we will have to work at it, and we may still have to be satisfied with something less than- perfect inte- gration; but we cannot afford to be content with as little as coexistence. Divorce is impossible. Whatever the secret hopes of some, the modern court volunteer is not going to go away. The Volunteer Returns to the Court The ghost of John Augustus rose again 'in 1960, looking somewhat different, when Royal Oak, Michigan, began easing into the use of volunteers with misdemeanants. Juvenile courts at Lawrence, Kansas, and Eugene, Oregon, had experimented with this kind of volunteer usage, since the mid- fifties. Judge Horace B. Holmes began using volunteers at the Boulder, Colorado, Juvenile 1 H. B. Holmes, et al., 'The Volunteer Returns to the Court, Juvenile Court Judges Journal, Volume 18, Number 4, Winter 1968. Court in 1961. But not until 1967 did the court volunteer movement really take hold. Today, some 50,000 citizens contribute several million hours of service a year, in 1,000 court probation de- partments, and at least one new court a day is estimated to be launching its venture into volun- teerism. These figures would be approximately doubled if one included parole and detention vol- unteer programs, as well as probation. Even in this infancy of the movement, there are more volunteers than paid people in probation and they may soon be contributing a larger total of service hours as well. Moreover, the explosive acceleration in current growth rate extrapolates to a near future in which one-quarter of all courts will have volunteers working in probation programs, for better or for worse, in, say, 1972. A similar sign of the times is the recent interest in planning and implementation of court volun- teer programs on a statewide basis. Florida and Washington are already doing so, and 20 other states have indicated to the National Information Center, serious interest at this level. This imme- diately raises the question whether court volun- teer programs are adaptable to the variety of local court and community conditions Adaptability to Local Communities and Courts There are good reasons for approaching court volunteer programs with care and caution. Not among these is saying: It works in your town because your town is unique. In the first place, 500 communities wear out the word unique and, on the evidence, the volunteer penetration into probation is broad as well as deep. Thus, what was said 2 years ago is more true today: The court volunteer movement is already too large for the hothouse flower label. It is also too hardy in surviving various types of environment. One of the clearest conclusions thus far is that a volunteer pro- bation program is not restricted to any one unique set of court or community conditions. Volunteer programs now flourish in every size and shape of American com- munity and court. They span rural areas, small towns, large cities and suburbia. Some volunteer courts are in communities with colleges and depend heavily on them; others do not.1

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most