Dangerousness as a Juvenile Court Judgment

少年法庭的工作人员经常必须在涉及法庭转介涉嫌犯罪的案件中对少年的危险性作出判决。超过三分之二的州的法规将“对社区构成危险”或“对他人构成危险”作为必须满足的法律标准，以便在短暂的两三天紧急时期之后允许对少年进行审前拘留。考虑到判决对青少年未来福利以及社区利益和保护的重要性，少年法院的危险判决具有高度的自由裁量性。毫不奇怪，对少年法庭的判决有相当大的研究兴趣。然而，过去的研究并没有具体地告诉我们法院的危险判决。大多数研究得出的结论是，准确预测危险是不可能的。格里斯索博士认为，在危险预测方面出现的僵局是在这一领域的研究中出现的太多方法和概念问题的结果。他假设，这些努力未能产生可行的暴力预测因素，部分原因是假设与暴力有关的因素与暴力具有线性关系，部分原因是研究基于不适当的样本。在这项研究中，他将调查变量之间的相互作用，使用集群方法，并检查青少年司法系统中各种行为者所做的决定，这些行为者提供了关于他们自己对危险的决定的数据。利用先前收集的432个案例的研究数据（由相同数量的少年法庭工作人员的全国样本报告），他将开发被少年法庭工作人员视为“危险”的少年案件的原型（典型概况）。原型将被概念化为青少年法庭在处理案件信息以达到危险判决时使用的潜在社会图式。这项研究将采用大量的经验推导的预测变量领域，并以反映实际经验丰富的决策者实践的方式将它们结合起来。如果能找到青少年案例原型，将极大地提高我们在未来的研究中更清楚地了解危险判断过程的本质，并检验这些判断的有效性。此外，它将支持社会图式方法在这种法律背景下描述决策的价值，并将普遍支持这种理论方法在其他决策研究中的启发式价值。

Juvenile court personnel frequently must make judgments about juveniles' dangerousness in cases involving court referrals for alleged delinquencies. The statutes of more than two-thirds of the states include "danger to community" or "danger to others" as a legal criterion that must be met in order to allow pretrial detention of juveniles beyond a brief two or three day emergency period. Juvenile courts' dangerousness judgments are highly discretionary considering the importance of the judgments to the future welfare of juveniles as well as the interests and protection of communities. Not surprisingly, there has been considerable research interest in juvenile courts' judgments. However, past studies have told us little about courts' dangerousness judgments specifically. Most studies have concluded that accurate prediction of dangerousness is not possible. Dr. Grisso feels that the impasse that has been felt in the prediction of dangerousness is the result of too many methodological and conceptual problems that have manifested themselves in studies in this area. He hypothesizes that the failure of these attempts to yield workable predictors of violence could rest partly on an assumption that factors related to violence bear a linear relationship to violence and partly on the fact that studies have been based on inappropriate samples. In this study, he will investigate interactions among variables, using a cluster approach, and examine decisions made by a variety of actors in the juvenile justice system who provided data about their own decisions regarding dangerousness. Using data from a previous study which collected 432 cases (reported by a national sample of the same number of juvenile court personnel), he will develop prototypes (typical profiles) of juvenile cases perceived as "dangerous" by juvenile court personnel. Prototypes will be conceptualized as potential social schemata used by juvenile courts when processing case information to arrive at dangerousness judgments. This research will take a large and empirically derived domain of predictor variables and combine them in ways that reflect the practice of actual experienced decisionmakers. If juvenile case prototypes are found, it could greatly improve our capacity in future research to understand more clearly the nature of the dangerousness judgment process and to examine the validity of these judgments. Further, it would support the value of a social schemata approach for describing decisionmaking in this legal context, and would support generally the heuristic value of this theoretical approach in other decision research.