Older adult inmates have grown both in proportion and in number due to the confluence of a number offactors. This aging of the prison population has created a host of policy and practice issues that encompass justice considerations, cost containment issues, and biopsychosocial care needs. The older prisoner's physical, social, and psychological needs are complex and necessitate gerontologically based service delivery systems. The intent of this article is to help in the preparation of social work practitioners who can engage in older adult prison advocacy work by familiarizing them with a review of pertinent literature. Topics discussed include the following: the characteristics of older adult inmates, the special needs of older offenders and accompanying service delivery issues, and the use of selective decarceration as one strategy for addressing the problem of prison overcrowding. The authors conclude the article with a summary of key challenges social workers face in assisting this population.
Previous studies suggest that both school and community connectedness among adolescents are associated with prosocial behaviors and positive outcomes. While delinquency is associated with lack of connectedness to school and community, little research has considered how delinquency affects this relationship for adolescents living in impoverished neighborhoods. This study estimated gendered trajectories of school and community connectedness for adolescents in impoverished neighborhoods as a function of their levels of delinquency. Results showed that delinquency was negatively correlated and that age was positively correlated with school connectedness for both genders. In contrast, community connectedness increased with age for boys, but decreased with age for girls. In addition, delinquency was negatively related to community connectedness for boys, but not for girls. These findings suggest that for adolescents in impoverished neighborhoods, gender‐informed interventions to decrease delinquency could have positive effects on school and community connectedness.
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