School Delinquency Prevention As Management of Rabble (From Crime Prevention and Intervention: Legal and Ethical Problems P 185-197, 1989, Peter-Alexis Albrecht and Otto Backes, eds.)

• NCJ Number: 120328
• Author(s): K Polk
• Date Published: 1989
• Length: 13 pages
• Sale Source: Walter de Gruyter & Co
• Publication Type: Issue Overview
• Language: English
• Country: West Germany (Former)

Annotation

School delinquency prevention procedures typically worsen delinquent alienation and seek merely to keep them under control until they leave school.

Abstract

Due to economic transformations, the connective pathways between school and work have eroded, resulting in high youth unemployment, perpetuated by alienation. Increasingly, analyses are focusing on the alienation that originates in school before the transition to work. Schools are likely to call upon their traditional repertoire of control procedures which assume that alienation and delinquency originate from individual pathology and which ignore structural problems. These procedures stigmatize and denigrate students and, by removing them from mainstream education, further alienate them and reduce their life chances for successful careers. Rather than engaging in the "management of rabble," school delinquency prevention programs should reorient towards structural problems. 18 references.