Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Strategies There

Juvenile Delinquency Prevention Strategies

There has recently been much focus on strategies meant to prevent juvenile delinquents from continuing their life of crime. While some have had limited results, others actually proved to be especially effective and have emphasized the fact that it is wrong for juvenile delinquents to be incarcerated in some situations. "For more than a century, efforts to prevent delinquency have been guided more by the prevailing theories about the causes of delin- quent behavior than by whether the efforts achieved the desired effects" (Greenwood 187). Preventing juvenile delinquency practically means that numerous young lives are saved from being wasted and that individuals are educated with regard to socially acceptable attitudes that they need to employ in order to be able to safely integrate the social order.

Electronic monitoring has come to be a widely used juvenile delinquency prevention strategy during the last few years. "EM programs may include home monitoring devices, wrist bracelets, ankle bracelets, field monitoring devices (GPS), alcohol testing devices, and voice verification systems" (Sklaver, 1)This method is effective because it provides the authorities with the opportunity to have a close watch over the individual and because it influences him or her to focus on adopting attitudes that are legal. Persons included in an electronic monitoring program are limited to performing a certain number of activities and are denounced in situations when they act in disagreement with the set of rules that they have been provided with.

Electronic monitoring has been associated with decreased recidivism and financial savings. The fact that young persons are forced to stay at home and go to school means that these people will have little to no chances to focus on things that are not educational in character and that they are not going to interact with criminal environments. Also, the community as a whole benefits as a result of the fact that juvenile delinquents are involved in electronic monitoring programs because these individuals are no longer sent to detention centers where the community would have to pay for their needs.

One of the biggest problems associated with electronic monitoring programs is the fact that the families of individuals involved in electronic monitoring programs suffer alongside of them. They are limited and they are unable to own items that the authorities consider to be dangerous when in the presence of individuals under supervision. "The phone line must be stripped of features such as call waiting, three-way calling, caller ID, or voicemail, so some families will have to pay for two landlines if they want those features for personal use" (Sklaver, 3). Also, in situations when the device's battery dies it might emit signals similar to the ones that it emits when a person flees, thus influencing police officers to arrest them even though they did nothing wrong.

Juvenile intensive probation is an important alternative to incarceration and it involves a stronger communication between the juvenile delinquent and the probation officer. The officer performs more unannounced spot checks and focuses on detecting any abnormality concerning the juvenile delinquent's behavior. The individual's family is also likely to suffer at this point, taking into account that they are also likely to be supervised. One of this method's principal advantages is the fact that the individual is virtually encouraged to performed socially acceptable actions, considering that he or she is well-acquainted with the fact that every one of his or her moves might be supervised. Surely, this is somewhat disturbing when considering that he or she has no right to intimacy and that he or she is probable to suffer on a social level because individuals that he interacts with are likely to find out about his or her background.

Although they are a controversial juvenile delinquency prevention technique, boot camps are effective because they provide individuals with the chance to learn important information concerning how they need to behave in order to obtain positive results while in the social order. Consequent to being in a boot camp, individuals learn more about basic life skills, improve their physical condition, and have an increased self-esteem. Concomitantly, however, many individuals in boot camps risk being abused and fail to learn a lot because they are simply unable to adapt. This means that their self-esteem goes down and that they are probable to experience significant traumas throughout their stay in boot camp.

Young people are provided with the chance to be rehabilitated and are taken off the streets and introduced to juvenile detention institutions at the time when they represent a serious threat. Society in general benefits from these processes because it no longer has potential criminals running free. Juvenile delinquents themselves also experience benefits because they are provided with the chance to see the bigger picture and to understand that there is much more to life than committing illegal activities. Education is one of the principal purposes of juvenile delinquent centers and this is reflected by the fact that many individuals leave these facilities with a greater interest in learning and with a visible inclination toward becoming better members of the social order.