Juvenile Deliquency

Juvenile Deliquency

Juveniles who are incarcerated due to lack of opportunities should be educated in prison. Many young people enter and leave prison with numerous problems on their backs. A large amount of these juveniles are either literate or numerate, which in most cases, stem from school exclusion, truancy and other forms of disrupted education. Thom Gehring a Criminal Justice major looks at a school in the state of Texas named Witham; a survey he conducted throughout the high school proved that the majority of these students enrolled in Witham had a history of academic failure. Also he observed that the majority of those students eventually dropped out of school, and most of them ended up in prison within three years. I believe if kids begin their lives with a positive view on education it will motivate them to accomplish more, but in this case the students expectations are negative so usually the results are similar. This is the case when dealing with most juveniles who are growing up in corrupt environments.

Education as crime prevention has proved itself to be affective according to the 1993 report to congress, which proved that the more education a inmate received in prison the better the chances that prisoner had of not returning for a second sentence. A 1998 study by the Little Hoover commission proved that prison education program in Florida, Illinois, Alabama and New York decreased repeat offense rates and raised employment. I believe that prison education is important because the majority of these juveniles imprisoned never got the chance to experience a quality education in the first place. I also believe that without a quality

education a juvenile is more likely going to make the wrong decisions in hi...

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...ds are easily influenced by the drugs and violence and usually begin to engage in the two. Most juveniles become addicted to the lifestyle of ignorance and unawareness and become prime candidates for imprisonment. I believe that positive environments and role models are significant factors when dealing with the out come of an individual, and most of these juveniles who are incarcerated in the Plainfield Juvenile Correctional Facility lack them both. Karla Haworth says, "The boys spend their days locked behind razor wire, doing time for crimes that some people say might have been prevented by better opportunities." The environment in which one lives in is very important, sometimes in violent neighborhoods it seems as if trouble comes looking for you, where as though in peaceful, non-violent neighborhoods it's hard to find trouble and violence is not likely to occur.