Juvenile Justice System In The 1970's

In 1925, the United States Congress passed the Federal Probation Act. This bill gave the U.S. courts system the power to appoint federal probation officers and the power to sentence defendants to probation instead of sending them to prison. The main function of these new officers was to supervise individuals that have been sentenced to probation, as well as those who were granted supervised release from prison. This new supervision system needed to classify their offenders, because not all of these individuals needed the same level of supervision. In the beginning the classification of these offenders was primarily dome by professional intuition. This means that the probation officer would sit down with his client and conduct an interview, from which the client would be classified. Obviously this system had many faults, the biggest of which was its low inter-rater reliability. This means one interviewer would classify an offender one way but another would classify that same offender as something else.

These methods took items that have been shown to increase recidivism, such as drug use, and assigned them a numerical score. Those scores would be added together and that number would assign the offender to the necessary level of supervision. This system was further enhanced in the 1980’s when individual need items were taken into consideration. This new system took the risk factors from the actuarial system and combined them with criminogenic need factors, such as employment and family relationships. Although this system reduced the problems with its predecessors it still was not good enough, so the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts decided to develop their own,