NCJ Number
163318
Date Published
1995
Length
281 pages
Annotation
This cultural diversity training manual, developed for law enforcement and juvenile justice practitioners, contains four modules and a cultural diversity action plan.
Abstract
The first module identifies the professional benefits of cultural diversity training as increased safety, compliance with police agency directives, increased job satisfaction, fewer citizen complaints against the police, minimized risk against successful lawsuits, decreased paperwork and hearings associated with complaints and lawsuits, and increased community involvement and cooperation. The second module focuses on explaining the concept of culture and cultural divesity and on defining such terms as culture, subculture, values, prejudice, stereotyping, ethnocentrism, racism, discrimination, acculturation, and assimilation. The third module covers cross-cultural communication, with emphasis on components of effective communication, factors that impede the communication process, automatic actions people take when they witness an event, and communication styles. The fourth module delineates questions professionals should ask themselves when dealing with people from different cultural groups and provides information on how to respond effectively to encounters with people from different cultures. The cultural diversity action plan contains exercises on self-awareness, values, prejudice, communication, goals, and task management. Extensive appendixes to the training manual focus on juvenile courts, juvenile community programs, juvenile institutional workers, and law enforcement.