NCJ Number
79029
Date Published
1978
Length
6 pages
Annotation
A model for treating delinquents is proposed in which traditional community agencies would integrate small numbers of delinquents into groups of prosocial youth.
Abstract
An overwhelming number of factors militate against effective rehabilitation in correctional institutions. These factors include multiple and conflicting organizational goals, overcrowding, deviant peer-group composition, low degree of transfer of changed behavior to the open community, labeling of former inmates, and high cost. Although many of these debilitating factors are eliminated in community residential programs, labeling and deviant peer groups remain as factors obstructing rehabilitation. Some traditional prosocial institutions for youth, however, eliminate all of these factors. Organizations such as the YMCA, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and Jewish community centers are geared toward recreational, educational, cultural, and leisure-time objectives. Such agencies and programs have two key advantages seldom found in juvenile correctional institutions: location in the open community and a plentiful supply of prosocial peers. The proposed model would place one or two youths in one of these traditional programs, with the deviant youths not being labeled before their peers in the group. Membership procedures, privileges, staff supervisory practices, and program activities would be only minimally altered, if at all, because of the deviant youth's participation. Preliminary studies of the use of the model have shown that deviant youth develop prosocial behaviors from their peer role models, while having insignificant negative impact on their prosocial peers.