NCJ Number
100718
Date Published
1984
Length
6 pages
Annotation
Four centers in the Sydney region (Australia) provide counseling, education, social skills training, and health and employment services to facilitate young offenders' helping themselves to develop a more constructive lifestyle.
Abstract
The program is designed to help young offenders with low self-esteem, a lack of parental guidance and positive motivation, basic education deficiencies, learning difficulties, few job skills, and poor social skills who are under conditional liberty programs. The program has been operating 4 months, and each center serves approximately 100 persons monthly. It is too early to assess program results against program goals. The program is likely to have long-term benefits only if it obtains public support and complementary efforts from other criminal justice components. Other phases of criminal justice processing could complement the self-help program by providing diversion, avoiding offender stigma, and dispensing innovative and flexible sentences. Public support for self-help programs would be facilitated by cultivating an awareness of the reasonableness and appropriateness of sentences other than incarceration. 7 footnotes.