Juvenile Rehabilitation

It is safe to say that most criminals or people who engage in criminal behavior are a product of their childhood development and upbringing. A person's early life years experiences such as parenting, peer attachments and community relations have a lot to do with whether or not a person will become deviant. Specifically, 30% to 40% of the antisocial behavior of early offenders—who are more likely to become violent offenders later—is linked to harsh, inconsistent parenting during the preschool years (Bogenschneider, K. 2006)

Once a juvenile is involved with delinquency and crime in a consecutive manner it takes a greater deal of work and efforts to rehabilitate the offender. In many cases, if the juvenile does not seek self-change at a young age, they fall under high risk of becoming a career criminal or a repeated offender as an adult.

The US Department of Justice: Office of Juvenile Programs reported that “During the period 1993-2003, juveniles ages 12-14 and juveniles ages 15-17 experienced average annual rates of nonfatal violence that were about 2½ times higher than the rate for adults (83 and 84 per 1,000 versus 32 per 1,000)” (OJJDP, Katrina Baum, 2005). This shows that juveniles are committing the same offenses as adults and in some cases juveniles are offending at a higher rate. It is not a good societal sign when children are committing more crimes that adults, this clearly marks a serious problem for the future of our kids.

An effective transformation of offenders is to start rehabilitation juveniles at an early stage. If the rehabilitation is done in the early years of a child offending then there is a greater chance that he will not do wrong again, if the rehabilitation works. Likewise the cases of juveniles as well as adult criminals will be decreased.

The process of getting a teen being involved with any rehabilitation program is highly recommended for the delinquent juvenile population to help stop the vicious cycle of youth crime. These kids are the future of our nation and they need to be handled and disciplined properly in order to educate them on the real value of life.

Legal authorities have the right to send these offenders to a juvenile correction center after they have apprehended them. These correction institutions are the parallel of the adult prison system and are established to create a deterrence for adolescents. Ideally, these institutions should be environments where the adolescent can contemplate about his or her wrong doings and choose to change his or her behavior. That is society’s hope for institutions to be but in reality they are harsh living conditions in which these juveniles learn more criminal techniques from their peers rather than turning their lives around.

Our ultimate goal with rehabilitation is to use cognitive and behavioral treatment interventions to teach youth skills needed to manage behavior and meet their needs in ways that are not harmful to self or others. Also to encourage our youth to leave their criminal background behind and pursue a better life in which they can take up a job or higher education to secure a long and healthy life for the individual and his or her family. In order to provide the proper type of help we must take into consideration the time and a method for each individual. The type of rehabilitation a child receives should depend on the age, gender, type of offenses committed and psychological and emotional state of the juvenile. The majority of youth receive intervention and treatment services such as Aggression Replacement Training, Family Integrated Transitions, and Functional Family Therapy (Department of Social and Health Services, 2010).  This type of intervention with an adolescent helps replace the negative factors in their daily lives such as aggression, poor parenting, and peers with innovative approaches used to teach juvenile offenders cognitive and behavioral skills to manage and control their behavior and relationships.

The approach that seems to work the best is family based programs and early prevention of delinquency. Early childhood delinquency prevention programs aim at positively influencing the early risk factors or “root causes” of delinquency or criminal offending that may continue into the adult years. Theses interventions are often multidimensional and targeted at more than one risk factor because they take a variety of different forms, including cognitive development, child skills training, and family support (Siegel and Welsh, 2012).  According to the textbook Juvenile Delinquency,  Nurse-Family Partnership is the best known home visitation program. This programs involves first time single mothers-to-be which receive home visits from nurses during pregnancy and the first two years of the childs life. These nurses provide advice to the mothers about the care of the child, infant development, and the importance of proper nutrition. 15 years after this program started it was found that the children involved in this home based program had fewer convictions and violations and were less likely to run away from home (Siegel and Welsh, 2012). This type of programs not only teaches the mother to become a responsible mother but it also reduces the chances of child abuse and neglect, which is proven to lead to criminal behavior.

When it comes to preventing juvenile delinquency, “there’s no place like home.”  It’s been said that families are “. . . the most powerful, the most humane, and by far the most economical system for building competence and character” (Mendel, 2001), therefore if we want to see a change with our youth delinquents we must place a strong emphasis on family relations.  Even after the adolescent has received the proper intervention, the support of the family is highly recommended to remind the child that the positive things in life outweigh crime.

References:

Baum, Katrina. "Juvenile Victimization And Offending, 1993-2003." Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report: National Crime Victimization Survey (2005): U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs. Web. 2 Nov. 2012. <http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/jvo03.pdf>.

Bogenschneider, K. (2006). Family policy matters: How policymaking affects families and what professionals can do.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Associates, Inc.
Mendel, D. (2001, December-January). Combating delinquency: No place like home. Youth Today, p. 59. Washington, DC: Youth Today

"Rehabilitation for juvenile offenders."Washington State Department of Social and Health    Services Feb. 2010:  Web. 5 Nov. 2012.

Siegel, Larry J., and Brandon Welsh. Juvenile delinquency: theory, practice, and law. 11th ed. Australia: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, 2012. Print.