Scott Briar

Police Encounters With Juveniles

In an observational study of police officers contacts with juveniles the authors reached these conclusion: (1) Wide discretion was exercised by policemen in dealing with youthful offeders. (2) The exercise of this discretion was affected by a few readily observable criteria, including boys prior offense records, race, grooming, and demeanor. Among first offenders particularly, but to some degree among all offenders, a youths demeanor was a major criterion for determining what police disposition he would be given. Officers estimated that 50-60 per cent of first offense dispositions were based on this criterion. (3) The differential in arrest and apprehension rates between Negroes and whites was not simply a consequence of a greater offense rate among the former or police bias. To some extent this differential was due to the fact that Negroes more often than Caucasians exhibited those aspects of demeanor associated by officers with true delinquent boys.

CLINICAL JUDGMENT IN FOSTER CARE PLACEMENT

Choice of placement in an important decision in foster care. This study examines some of the factors affecting social workers clinical judgments associated with the choice of institutional care or foster family care in the placement of children.

Book Review: Foster Parenthood: A Role AnalysisFoster Parenthood: A Role Analysis:FanshelDavid176 pp., 1966. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Available through Social Casework.

Camille Jeffers lived as a participant observer for fifteen months in a public housing project while she was a staff member of the Child Rearing Study of Washington, D.C. She lived there as a working mother and head of her household, and she has written the story of her adventure in a style that is disarmingly chatty and personal. This is a pamphlet, really-an unpretentious description that could be read in little time and (mistakenly) taken on face value as a collection of vignettes about nice, interesting people who happen to be poor. The reader may find himself involved in the narrative, for it is easy to become identified with the people about whom Mrs. Jeffers has written. He may laugh at a poignant and funny scene in the courtyard of the housing project and want to cry when he reads about children eating a newly purchased loaf of day-old bread before their mother has a chance to put away the rest of her groceries. To mention other behaviors or to describe the insights that course through this book would be to deprive the reader of the pleasure of having it unfold, incident by incident. Mrs. Jeffers came to know her neighbors very well, and she writes about them so economically that the book is a marvelous understatement. The style of the book may be distracting, and the almost complete absence of conceptualizations until the very end may lead the reader astray for a while. But not for long. Mrs. Jeffers has made some very significant and profound points that are reflected in the case vignettes themselves. The reader comes upon them with a quite sudden, if not half-conscious, awareness. He realizes that he has been exposed not only to a sensitive exposition of how people live in poverty but also to knowledge he has been seeking in order to deal with the current popular generalizations about the culture of poverty. The books subtitle is A Participant Observer Study of Choices and Priorities. As the reader comes to know Mrs. Jeffers neighbors, he realizes that of all the generalizations that have been made about living poor, the need of the poor to make choices from limited options is probably the most important categorical thing that can be said about them. Throughout the book, it is clear that poor people must make adaptations to economic deprivation. The reader is not led into making generalizations about the behaviors of poor people or about their integral culture. Mrs. Jeffers neigh234 bors are, above all, individuals like the rest of us. Their lives are certainly more arduous and their opportunities for sustenance more governed by life-and-death requisites, and they are more subject to the arbitrary positions of public bureaucracies, but they are indeed recognizable persons in their unique ways of coping. I suppose that is the reason the reader wants to laugh or cry on several occasions. He cannot help but empathize with the behavior and emotion expressed by the people he meets; it is the universality among people that is so familiar. Mrs. Jeffers makes her point without effort: If there is a culture to be identified, it is the culture of humanity and not the culture of poverty. The implications for social work practice loom on every page. They have less to do with classification of behaviors and identification of so-called group values than with comprehension of the harsh impact of poverty upon people who continually have to make terribly important decisions about terribly limited choices. The author makes it seem so easy to communicate and understand, if only we would listen without preconceived answers. She comments about situations that made her examine more closely what people want as compared to what others think they need. This is a most useful observation for social workers, whose business it is to listen. While reading, I had some sense of discomfort about Mrs. Jeffers living among the poor but not being really of them. She was sensitive to this matter herself, as is evident in her confusion about what to do with her fruit bowl when a neighbors hungry children came into her apartment. I dont know how she was able to live in comparative comfort while those around her suffered, but she was a very good neighbor with it all, and I gather that she was respected as an individual, just as she respected her neighbors. CAROL H. MEYER, D.S.W. Columbia University School of Social Work New York, N.Y.