NCJ Number
109983
Date Published
Unknown
Length
8 pages
Annotation
The juvenile justice system should maintain an emphasis on helping young people and should reallocate resources to substantially increase the proportion being spent on prevention and on community-based corrections.
Abstract
Although the last 15 years has seen an increasing emphasis on punishment and on incarceration, the concept of helping young people remains an underlying foundation. In recent years, however, resources have been diverted from community corrections to institutional programs. Nevertheless, data from many States show clearly that reliance on incarceration is not the answer to the problem of juvenile crime. Communities that are exhausted emotionally and financially by punitiveness and overreliance on incarceration are beginning to relearn that prevention is our best response to crime. However, less than 1 percent of the criminal justice dollar has been allocated to prevention. Allocating 40 percent to prevention, 20 percent to community-based supervision, and 40 percent to juvenile institutions would allow us to help keep youths out of trouble while continuing to respond to the need for community protection. The delinquency prevention program run by the probation department of Kern County, Calif., illustrates this point. Its components include a crisis resolution center, school teams, and a delinquency prevention consultant. Society must continue to accept responsibility for youth and must help funding sources, lawmakers, public interest groups, and corporate and media interests see that supporting corrections and prevention is in their best interest.