'Half Judge and Half Social Worker': Judicial Decision Making in Status Offense Cases

Only children can be convicted of running away from home, truancy, incorrigibility, curfew violations, possession and consumption of alcohol and the purchase of cigarettes. Historically, these status offense behaviors were punished with detention more than acts of juvenile delinquency. The Federal government aimed to reduce secure detention of status offenders through the enactment of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act (JJDPA) in 1974. Tremendous variation in detention continues across states and individual judges. The primary questions that guided this research were: How and why do juvenile court judges decide to securely detain status offending youth within the context of the Federal JJDPA, state laws and practices and other considerations?;Two theoretical frameworks guided this research: Sampson and Laub's macro structural approach to legal reasoning and Michael Lipsky's street level bureaucracy. This research combined qualitative interviews with judges (n=20) and non-judge stakeholders (n=20) with document analysis in four states.;One significant finding of the research was the lack of reliable and comprehensive data about secure detention of status offenders, the use of the valid court orders (VCO) or compliance with the JJDPA. Other findings include that the case characteristics which emerged as important were the frequency of the behaviors and the particular offenses. Client characteristics, such as mental health status, gender and age also played a role in judges' decisions. Some of the challenges judges communicated included inadequate information about cases or treatment options, conflicting goals and messaging from different governmental levels and inadequate community based alternatives to detention for status offending youth.;There are policy implications of this work around the use of VCOs and the reauthorization of the JJDPA. Implications for practice included the need to appropriate adequate resources for alternatives to detention, the prioritization of education for judges, and a need for better monitoring of judicial behavior and systematic data collection. This research both identified and partially filled many of the gaps in our collective knowledge about how judges make decisions. The application of multiple theoretical models in this research led to a more refined combined theoretical model that could be explored in future research.