article on juvenile offenders

[sarahmichigan]

I think it's worthwhile to wait through the commercial for the "free site pass" at salon.com today to read the article "Their Misspent Youth" by Ayelet Waldman. Usually, I'm pretty "meh" about her personal essays, but this article has some research behind the opinion. She gives an interesting comparison between two facilities. One follows a jail model and has a recidivism rate of about 90 percent. The second facility contains offenders who have much more violent offenses in general and follows a more school-like model. It has a recidivism rate of about 10 percent three years out.

I think that in older populations, perhaps some folks are too hardened to benefit from "rehabilitation," but if anyone has a chance to change, I'd think teenagers would be more pliable in that regard. It's an interesting read.

Comments

[dare2grok.livejournal.com]

That doesn't surprise me. From all I've read and heard, my overall impression is that it is vital there be a focus on making the environment of juvenile incarceration, both physically and mentally, one of rehabilitation.

Generally, this is in line with my opinion that offenders, no matter how old or hardened, require a lot more "hands-on" incarceration than we give them. We have a tendency to warehouse inmates . . . many of their lives consist of a cell with piped in cable TV, unstructured "recess" in a yard full of weights and balls, and either perpetrating injury on or trying to avoid injury from other inmates.

An inmate's time--aside from minimal but adequate time for sleep, recreation, and other basics--should be spent in proportions either at labor, participating and progressing in rehabilitation, doing bona fide legal research on their case, or sitting in their cell surrounded by as many books as they want because they choose to do nothing else (this last case is very close to warehousing, but it's not the system's fault this time).

Such a system may cost more, but that's only because the current system is underfunded as evidenced by its ineffectiveness.