INTERNAL POLICE RECORDS AND THE CONTROL OF JUVENILES: Politics and Policing in a Suburban Town

This paper examines the consequences of external (i.e., community) and internal (i.e., administrative) pressure on the police to discourage the arrest and formal processing of a community's juveniles. The department's response resulted in a shift to surveillance and the development of inte...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:British journal of criminology 1993-10, Vol.33 (4), p.504-524
Main Author: Meehan, Albert J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Arrest records
Arrests
Communities
Criminal arrests
Criminal sociology. Police. Delinquency. Deviance. Suicide
Criminal statistics
Criminology
Interrogations
Juvenile Delinquency
Juvenile Justice
Juvenile justice, Administration of
Juvenile Offenders
Management
Minors
Parents
Police
Police Community Relations
Police reports
Policing
Records management
Social research
Sociology
Sociology of law and criminology
Surveillance
Towns
Urban areas
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Summary:This paper examines the consequences of external (i.e., community) and internal (i.e., administrative) pressure on the police to discourage the arrest and formal processing of a community's juveniles. The department's response resulted in a shift to surveillance and the development of internal recordkeeping as the primary form of control. Thus, the police were able to satisfy the community's demand and their own organizational needs for information regarding the nature and extent of juvenile deviance at the same time. However, increased reliance on surveillance bypasses not only the stigma of the formal process, but also its guarantees, and thereby ironically increases police control over juveniles. The results of informal recordkeeping practices also have implications for understanding official crime statistics. That is, departments are able to 'manage' their crime rates so that towns with apparently equal levles of juvenile deviance have very different official 'rates' of juvenile crime.
ISSN:0007-0955
1464-3529
DOI:10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.a048356