With all of the individual, family, community, and societal costs of juvenile delinquency, it is fair to ask if we are doing the right things to facilitate its reduction. It is so easy to stay in the same old mind set, while simply changing our outward appearance. To this day, many programs continue to emphasize services to individual youth who have demonstrated delinquent or pre-delinquent behaviors, without giving sufficient focus to family, neighborhood, and community factors that facilitate or support negative youth behavior. If we look at youth as the rising plants in the garden of society, we are sure to pay more attention to these facilitative factors.
Here are some principles that can help us:
- We need to intervene earlier in the life of your youth.
- We need to focus on the youth with the greatest need of resiliency enhancement.
- We need to pay attention to how we are presenting our services, and to how we are attempting to engage youth, families, and communities.
- We need to be sure that our staff know how to intervene effectively with youth, families, and communities.
- We need to do what works, not what fits with our personal, political, or ideological views.
- We need to know if we are making a difference; we need to evaluate our interventions with youth, families, and communities; and we need to make changes in those services that are not effective.
- We need to employ people who can focus on helping families, who can put aside political and ideological differences (i.e., can be balanced and human) in their work.
As we employ these principles, we can truly make a difference in the lives of our youth. We can work with youth, families, and communities in a way that truly begins to prevent juvenile delinquency. Perhaps at some point juvenile delinquency will be like so many historical diseases, extinguished from our society.
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