Do All Juvenile Prevention Programs Work?

Juvenile delinquency is a passionate subject for me for many reasons. I can go on for days and hours just discussing this topic because of my experience as a minority brought up in an urban community. It is unfortunate to say that the majority of my friends growing up did not make it to see 18 years of life or even make it to live a crime-free life. As a teenager, I always tried to insert some knowledge to all my friends to do the right things to prevent jail time or even death but unfortunately, my advice did not work. At the time I thought my advice did not work because either at home their parents were not setting a good example or there weren’t enough programs available to help deter juveniles from participating in crimes in the future.

I came across a great article on governing.com called Programs Like D.A.R.E. and Scared Straight Don’t Work. Why Do States Keep Funding Them? This article made me realized that urban communities do in fact have programs to help deter future criminals but the programs are just simply broken.

Let me brief you guys about the Scared Straight program

Scared Straight is a program intended to deter juveniles from participating in future crimes. Juvenile and at-risk youth visits prisons and observes first-hand prison life and interacts with adults prisoners. The goal of this program is to demonstrate to these juveniles what is like to be incarcerated in the hope to “scare them straight” and deter them from future crimes.

The Scared Straight intervention was found to be more harmful than doing any good. Studies have found that Scared Straight programs are purely not effective in deterring criminal activity, in fact, the intervention “may be harmful and increase delinquency relative to no intervention at all with the same youths” (Hale, 2010). The Scared Straight programs are not deterring youth from future violation of the law, but it is oddly increasing the chances of the juvenile ending up behind bars.

The million dollar question is why still fund programs that have been found to be more harmful than doing any good?

The main reason why programs like Scared Straight continue to be funded and supported by the government is that strong constituencies back the interventions. The federal Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking has been advocating to bring more analysis policy decision. They have pointed to use randomized controlled trials (RCTs), which help test whether or not the program works. The issues have been that RCTs are very expensive and state and local government cannot afford them, there for the local government officials get “sucked into programs backed by strong constituencies but that offer no evidence of effectiveness” (Kettl, 2018). Due to the loyal advocate of programs, the government ends up spending a lot of money into programs that do not work. Overall, many state governments have been stubbornly stuck with the program until the Justice Department has warned them that they could lose funding if they continue to use the program.

Better programs needs to be put in place to help break the cycle.

 

References

Hale, J. (2010, November 27). Scared Straight? Not Really. Retrieved from https://psychcentral.com/blog/scared-straight-not-really/

Kettl, D. (2018, June). Programs Like D.A.R.E. and Scared Straight Don’t Work. Why Do States Keep Funding Them? Retrieved from http://www.governing.com/columns/washington-watch/gov-dare-drug-programs.html

View all posts