Intake agencies were established for the purpose of drawing up individualized correctional plans for convicted offenders, based on observation and consultation prior to their being assigned a permanent institutional placement. The intent was to provide humane, treatment-oriented corrections tailored to the individual's rehabilitation needs, whereby the negative prisonization effects would be minimized through the creation of programs for compatible inmate peer groups. Resource constraints have made the true implementation of such diversified programming impossible, while intake agency operations have taken on an inmate classification function that merely screens clients according to established age, dangerousness, and addiction criteria. They represent little more than an additional institutional insert between pretrial detention and correctional imprisonment. Their principal clientele are offenders sentenced to long-term correctional placement, for whom some planning can be done with respect to rehabilitative goals. A second function of the intake agencies is to plan the maximal utilization of correctional facility space and resources, which evidences their role within the social control system. Since increasing financial constraints will result in increasingly repressive correctional policies it is this latter role which intake agencies can be expected to serve in the future. Eight references are given.