Cleveland Foundation Survey of Criminal Justice in Cleveland - Taschenbuch

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PROBATION THE city of Cleveland employs probation officers in the Municipal and Cuyahoga County employs them in the Juvenile Court. Probation work in Common Pleas Court is supposed to be performed by parole officers attached to the State Reformatory at Mansfield and the penitentiary in Columbus. While a detailed study of the work of the State Parole Department did not fall within the scope of this survey, it is obvious that the small staff of officers attached to these two State institutions is overwhelmed with parole work and can give little time to probation work in the various counties. The Common Pleas judges in Cleveland have for a long time recognized that they cannot depend upon the parole officers of the State to conduct the painstaking investigations which the modern probation system requires. As a consequence, these judges are attempting to settle cases in advance through the imposition of sentences or by change of disposition. No matter how well inten- tioned the judge, the fact that he changes his dispositions so frequently in itself has a tendency to lower respect for the courts as impartial tribunals, for to the ordinary criminal a favorable change of disposition means that the court or some officer has been "seen." This attitude of offenders must be appreciated in planning a proper correctional system for Cleveland. Municipal Court judges observe this tendency of the Common Pleas courts and have pushed it to absurd extremes. The number of cases municipal judges have to handle, the speed required, and all of the conditions surrounding the courts are productive of results which are unworthy of Cleveland. Other branches of this survey have observed in detail how cases are handled. We have confined ourselves to a study of the results of their work as ...