Our general theme in yesterday's class was the Functionalist perspective - that connection to culture reduced the amount of deviant or maladaptive behaviors in a society. Take a look at how the state of Missouri works with first time offenders noting their emphasis on re-connecting or connecting for the first time these inmates.
Let me know what you think of this and please bring some materials about Missouri (or other articles you might stumble across) next Saturday so that we can continue the conversation.
Another Correct Answer!!
5 comments:
The Missouri Rehabilitaion Program serves youth offenders with an emphasis that lies within a rehabilitation process designed around small groups of offenders and highly trained staff. Their is a focus on personal development, education, job training, and additional programs that ensure youths recieve correct treatment. Each youth is assigned a Case Worker who serves as a middle man between courts and family to enhance assessment, treatment planning, and to coordinate the correct services available to youth. The Case Worker ensures that court expectations are met regarding work, treatment, and supervision. The Intensive Case Monitoring Program is in constant contact with youth in aftercare or community programs to provide additional supervision and if the youth needs any help. The Residential piece is either intermediate or a secure level with an continued emphasis on meeting individual psychological education, vocational training, and medical needs, They create an environment that is dignified, structured, supportive, and theraputic. The Missouri Rehabilitation program targets youths as individuals, because each offender is individualistic in nature. The main goals to achieve is communication, social skill development, problem solving, conflict resolution, substance abuse prevention, healthy relationship skills, esteem enhancements, and victim empathy enhancements. The end result for these youths is to re-enter society, and allow youths to experience re-integration while having some state regulations and supervision.
The Rehabilitation programs serves the population by re-connecting first time offenders back with society.An example of this would be the program SATOP its a 10 hour education course that allows first time offenders to understand the choices they made and the consequences of there actions.THis allows patient to be motivated to change to re-direct their behavior and to make better choices.
I think the Missouri Rehab Model can serve as a Model for Juvenile
Matters throughout the nation. The focus of the Model is placed on rehabilitation over punishment. According to available data, offenders who leave Missouri's system are from 50% to 66% less likely to re-enter adult or juvenile corrections. This statistical data is an indication of success, when compared to the 1948 incident at Boonville Training school for Boys,which at one point housed 650 boys. The Corrections reform policy at Boonville in 1948, resulted in 3 boys loosing their lives due to the training school program that lacked effective rehabilitation , poor education and its penitentiary feel, which included a dark confinement cell referred to as "The Hole". The cottage experiment led by Mark Steward in the mid-1970's, set out to change the Missouri Juvenile Justice system In Missouri. The approach of placing primary emphasis, on a better rehabilitation process, with small groups of offenders living in cottages with more intensive case monitoring, with youths living within 50 miles of home, so parents can participate in therapy, seperating violent offenders from offenders, guilty of less serious crimes, and Numerous day-treatment centers to help recent inmates make a more effective transiton to life in the community,proved to be more cost efficent, compared to states that rely more heavily on lockups. I've learned that experiments like Missouri's Cottage experiment for use as a Juvenile Justice system, requires an incremental approach for reform, rather than revolutionizing juvenile corrections with a single bill. Experimentation with small groups, that resist the formation of a prison culture, which will institutionalize juvenile correction offenders and create institutionalize behavior, that juvenile offenders get used to and can't get away from. The Missouri Juvenile Justice program places emphasis on personal development, education, with a merit system for success and an intolerance for those who pull against the group. The reform of Missouri Juvenile System also, places importance on the concept that freedom is earned; in this program the juvenile offender learns some of the importance of freedom in the Community, communication strategies, development of social skills, some conflict resolution skills, incremental increases in self-esteem and learn some conformity to Society rules. Unfortunately I don't think, this model in certain States will be reviewed or accepted, because in most states the emphasis of Corrections reform is not placed on treatment but on security.
The revamped rehabilitation programs being headed in Missouri has abandoned the training school approach, and has moved to a decentralized regional system created to provide a more positive, rehabilitative environment for youths. The agency began opening a series of smaller 10-, 20-, 30- and 40-bed facilities across the state. The objective was to keep youths closer to their families and to house them in smaller, more intimate settings that are more conducive to personal growth, development and accountability. Missouri's juvenile offenders, including those in secure care, are now housed in open dorms, rather than in cells or individual rooms. In addition, the youths are permitted to wear their street clothes within the nurturing and less institutional-like environment. I feel this model can be an effective tool because; it places the focus on rehabilitation over punishment.
Arcola Bowden,
Missouri and other states are using new approaches in the juvenile justice system to try to stem the flow of adults behind bars. Missouri managed to cut its adult population from 2005 through the first half of 2007 by applying techniques from the Missouri Model.
The reforms have begun to have a national impact, with a 12 percent decrease in juvenile offenders from 1997 to 2006, from 105,000 youths to 93,000.
Most of the decline during that period was in state confinements, although some of the decrease is attributed to a 28 percent decline in youth arrests, which reform advocates say proves that there is no detriment associated with fewer incarcerated juveniles.
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