Motivated by growing doubts about the juvenile court's ability to deal effectively with young offenders, countries such as the United States and Australia have established informal treatment programs ostensibly designed to divert youths from formal court prosecution. Such programs, however, have been criticised on the grounds that, rather than fulfilling a diversionary function, they have widened the net of social control. By focusing on the two-tiered Panel system currently in operation in South Australia, this article presents inferential evidence that net-widening did occur after the introduction firstly, of Aid Panels in 1972 and secondly, of Screening Panels in 1979. However, in both instances, this net-widening was restricted to a relatively short time period, after which the numbers of youths selected for processing by the juvenile justice system stabilised.
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