Basic models of juvenile justice with regard to the role and the status of social work

Abstract

The role and the position of social services in the juvenile justice system have changed significantly over the past decades. Generally speaking, key models of juvenile justice have been: welfare, justice and welfare-justice. The welfare model has basically been known for an intense involvement of social services, while the justice model generally ignored that issue. The last few decades of the 20th century brought a series of new models with combined elements of the welfare and the justice approaches. That implies a greater or a lesser social protection of juvenile delinquents, largely dependent on a wider criminal and social policy that a given country supports and on the global trends which are highly expressed in the field of juvenile justice. The aim of this paper is to, by using the historical method and the comparative legal method, point out that the aforementioned models differ, among other things, by the role of social services, and the importance that is generally given to social protection of the vulnerable category of juvenile offenders.