The Tariff, Social Inquiry Reports and the Sentencing of Juveniles

Based on a sample of 1,561 cares, this paper examines how type of offence, previous convictions, previous disposals and social inquiry report recommendations intuence juvenile court sententing decisions. Multiple regression analysis is used to determine the relative predictive power of these variables. While type of previous court disposal and current offence(s) were powerful factors, it was found that the inclusion of the social inquiry report recommendation as an additional variable greatly improved prediction of the court outcome. The findings have implications for how social workers and probation officers present information to the court.