No abstract
The Wayne County Juvenile Court in Detroit, Michigan, recently developed and evaluated three in-home, intensive supervision programs as alternatives to commitment for adjudicated delinquents. More than 500 youths were randomly assigned to either intensive supervision or a control group that was committed to the state for placement. The evaluation found the in-home programs to be as effective as commitment for about one-third the cost. Two years after random assignment, the experimental and control group cases showed few differences in recidivism, either in official charges or by self-report. The study suggests that in-home programs are a viable option for many youths who would otherwise be committed.
Society's conventional response to problems of young people--such as teenage pregnancy, school dropout, substance abuse, juvenile delinquency, and violence--is to target a specific problem and develop intervention or prevention programs for individuals who manifest the problem or are at high risk of it. Research shows that overlapping risk and protective factors affect the occurrence of all of these problems and that prevention strategies aimed at enhancing youths' development, reducing communities' specific risks, and strengthening protective factors are likely to be more successful than programs addressing the problem behaviors themselves. Among such strategies deserving wider consideration are "comprehensive community initiatives" that create collaborative partnerships among public officials, service providers, primary institutions, and citizens to promote the well-being of children, youths, and families.
The social distribution of youths who engage in delinquent behavior is not ,exactly the same as that of youths who come into contact with the juvenile justice system. Thus a certain amount of discretion characterizes the decisions made at various points within the system. In seeking an understanding of the discretionary processes, researchers have tried to isolate elements related to dispositions at distinct decision points. In addition to offense and offense history, the elements of sex, race, and social class have often been the foci of these studies, several of which are reviewed here. This review suggests that as a youth penetrates further into the juvenile justice system, factors other than his present offense become increasingly salient to decision-makers. It also appears that, once apprehended, girls tend to fare worse than boys do at the hands of the system. However, extreme caution is urged in generalizing from these, studies, which differed in time, place, methodology, and scope. Perhaps the most important conclusion of this review is that a clear understanding of the decision-making processes in the juvenile system is unlikely until a systematic research strategy or set of strategies emerges to replace the piecemeal approaches used to date. Some suggestions for such strategies are offered. AS DEFINED by Williams and Gold,' I delinquent behavior is behavior of a juvenile which, if detected by an appropriate authority, could result in legal sanction, and official delinquency is the identification of and response to such behavior by the police and the courts. Recent studies have shown that the social distribution of delinquent behavior along a number of dimensions does not match that of official delinquency.' Specifically, a disproportionately large number of lower-class youth, nonwhite youth, older youth, and girls become official delinquents. Thus the juvenile justice system, far from being blind, evidences a highly selective perception.
This research investigated the effects of the closing of a juvenile correctional institution. A nonequivalent control group design was used to compare the effects of the closing on placements and criminal behavior for three groups (N = 927) whose institutionalization experiences differed. Official crime data were obtained for all, and interviews were attempted with 752 juveniles. The noninstitutionalized group's recidivism was significantly higher than that of the institutionalized groups both during and after the period of institutionalization. Consistent group differences in offending were observed for crimes against property but not for crimes involving drugs or crimes against persons. These differences were significant but not as pronounced when only the most serious crimes were considered. Implications for the design of effective juvenile correctional strategies are discussed.
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