In short, the courts are the sale means of making social service agencies do their jobs. "The court is the only one who can make a social agency serve these people. In the first place, these are not very nice people. They are argumentative and uncooperative, and ungrateful Social workers like to deal with people who are articulate and responsive. They don't want to deal with these people." Judge Portrast claims that the Children's Hearings Project's 60 percent success rate is simply insufficient. That's just not enough. The failure rate is just too high."

There is little evidence, however, to suggest that the court system is more effective in dealing with status offenders. Recently mediation has represented an increasingly popular alternative to in-court settlement of disputes in many areas. At the Harvard Law School, Professor Frank Sander offers a course which trains student in dispute resolution techniques and then placed them in actual mediation programs.

Several students enrolled in Professor Sander's course are doing their clinical internships with the Children's Hearings Project. One of them Lisa Gillespie, feels strongly that "status offenders should be taken out of court. Children don't like to adhere to agreements that are externally imposed on them, and they'll be a lot more compliant if they played a role in coming to an agreement."

On that premise, mediation programs designed to take CHINS cases out of Juvenile Court are springing up throughout the United States. Just as the decriminalization movement made sweeping gains during the early 1970's so the mediation alternative currently is causing a stir in legal and judicial circles.

But Children's Hearings Project director Wixted does not anticipate that juvenile mediation programs will become legislatively institutionalized in the foreseeable future. "The CHINS legislation won't be reformed because basically this country is very conservative. Remember that we are voting to reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts."

In addition, Wixted says, the movement for legislative reform suffers from a lack of coherent national leadership. "Every mediation project in every state will be different because that's the way this country works, on the principle of diversity and individuality. Each locale has to develop its program according to its interests." Some programs, she points out, were not organized with the intention of reforming the Juvenile Court system. "In a lot of places they [social service programs] just want to help the families who are having problems."