Turning the Tide of Male Juvenile Delinquency
The Ocean Tides Approach
Preface
This book is about troubled and troublesome adolescents. They have broken laws of sufficient seriousness to merit being sentenced to a youth prison or training school, but instead have been temporarily placed in a rehabilitative school for delinquent boys in Rhode Island. It is about a school called Ocean Tides that has evolved into a model educational and rehabilitative program for juveniles. This book exemplifies a multidisciplinary approach toward solving social problems through research and practice.
The authors cull information from sociology, psychology, criminology, and criminal justice to explain why juveniles commit crimes and to develop strategies toward rehabilitation that directly address the causes. Analyzing data that span 31 years from a large study of youthful offenders, they describe how the program, its design, and implementation provide a viable alternative to youth prison.
Adolescents commit crimes as a way of relieving strain in their lives that is created by the presence of negative experiences and by the absence of positive and constructive parenting, resulting in the imbalance of reinforcements over constraints against criminal coping. For the most part, delinquents are just kids who, by virtue of circumstances that are usually beyond their own control, make the wrong choices. Rehabilitating youthful offenders requires changing these circumstances: taking them away from those negative experiences, providing supportive surrogate parenting, helping them to realize their own potential, and emphasizing their own talents and strengths to guide them away from crime.
The focus of the book is on how to help young men, who have gone sufficiently astray to be incarcerated, change their lives for the better. We describe a residential education and treatment program that began in the mid-1970s and at the time was a nontraditional way of dealing with court-adjudicated male juvenile delinquents. The national trend, beginning in the late 1970s, was toward a more punitive orientation in contrast to rehabilitation in the 1960s. The new trend involved harsher and longer sentences and trying more juveniles as adults, and continued through the 1980s to the early 1990s. In 1993 and 1994 there were spikes in violent crime among juveniles that were primarily due to demographic changes in the population structure brought on by the coming of age of the second generation of baby boomers. Nonetheless, this crime spike reinforced and strengthened the punitive approach. Researchers and practitioners warned of the ill effects that incarcerating juveniles had on them and began offering assistance to states to reform their juvenile justice systems. For example, “since 1992, the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, has demonstrated that jurisdictions can safely reduce reliance on secure confinement and generally strengthen their juvenile justice systems through a series of interrelated reform strategies” (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2014). However, rather than questioning the utility of a punitive approach, the emphasis on punishment intensified, and this national trend continued at least until 2004. The sharp decline in crime that followed the spike in the 1990s was incorrectly attributed to the effectiveness of the punitive approach by some policy makers. As youth detention facilities began to burst at the seams around 2005 and recidivism skyrocketed to 85%, state officials began to examine alternatives to incarceration. Now they seem to be running in the opposite direction and many policy makers are leaning toward home confinement for troubled teens in an effort to save money. Unfortunately, confining a delinquent to the very environment that may have produced the initial problems in the first place will only result in more criminal behavior right into adulthood. Incarceration and home confinement are extreme reactions to juvenile crime and neither one makes sense, but there are logical and proven alternatives to these extremes.
The goals of this book are to provide useful empirical information about male juvenile delinquents; to serve as a model training manual for new programs and people working in existing rehabilitation programs; to provide guidelines for developing policy on the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents; to be a resource for academicians and others who teach courses on juvenile delinquency; and to be assigned as a supplementary textbook for students learning about juvenile delinquency, juvenile justice, and mental health.
Contributions to the Literature
Research Methods
The Ocean Tides project is the first of its kind. It is first to amass comprehensive data on juvenile delinquents from so many different sources. Rich sources provided the researchers the ability to check and cross-check information about the boys for accuracy. The juvenile justice community that includes practitioners, clinicians, researchers, and educators has long predicted that delinquents would fare much better in rehabilitative diversionary programs than in youth prisons or in home confinement. However, to date, there is no study that empirically tests the validity of this assumption on a large database of delinquents with information derived from a plethora of sources about these young men’s characteristics, behaviors, and experiences. Studies that do include analyses of empirical data on juvenile delinquents do not access multiple sources, as these authors do. They instead typically focus on one of the two sources for information: (a) police records or (b) self-reports from the juveniles. Juveniles commit an average of five serious crimes before they are officially arrested in the United States. A juvenile may have been arrested for burglary but have a long history of violent behavior that is missed in studies that limit their data to police records. Hence, in these studies, juveniles are being misclassified. This study finds that nearly 5% of violent juveniles would have been misclassified as nonviolent had it relied solely on police records.
Research on juveniles indicates that self-reports of misbehavior are equally unreliable because respondents tend to overexaggerate some types of crimes and underreport others. Compounding the problem, several self-report studies on juveniles use telephone-survey methods, and parental supervision during the interviews restricts honest disclosure, especially about violent victimization that may be going on at home. Using multiple sources of information about the boys’ behaviors and their experiences allowed the researchers to check and cross-check information for the most accurate analyses. No other study exists that has taken this approach to create a large database—partly because it is typically costly and time-consuming to do—but these authors have done it.
Family Violence Literature
One of the several important findings from the research is that nearly 58% of the Ocean Tides boys behaved violently prior to entering the program and that figure drops to 22% while residing in the program. Prior to entering the Ocean Tides program, boys who were physically or sexually abused, or boys who were exposed to physical violence among parental figures, were most likely to act violently versus strictly engaging in nonviolent forms of behavior. Once boys were in the Ocean Tides program, the effects of prior physical and sexual abuse on violence are diminished, and the effects of exposure to parental interpersonal violence (
Contributions to Theory of Family Therapy
Agnew’s General Theory of Crime
This is one of the first tests of Agnew’s general theory of crime that focuses on strains that are produced from within families even though the family domain is the most influential component of this theory. This is a criminological theory that explains how and why people who experience the same events can respond differently. It is very helpful for practitioners working in the mental health profession to broaden their scope of understanding and look to fields outside of psychology that may provide them with more tools to use when counseling juvenile offenders.
Family Therapy Theories
The description of the program illustrates the use and application to delinquency of an integrative eclectic model of family counseling and evaluation that incorporates aspects of structural family therapy, problem-centered systems therapy of the family, and strategic family therapy. This approach hones the most effective strategies into a single unified evolutionary approach to rehabilitation.
How the Book Can Be Used
The authors of this book take a multidisciplinary approach that will appeal to everyone who thinks about juvenile delinquency: politicians; judges; police; teachers; clinicians; social workers; educators; and students of criminology, criminal justice, juvenile delinquency, family violence, sociology, psychology, and counseling. This approach appeals to undergraduate students in liberal arts programs that require them to take courses in multiple disciplines, and to graduate students in the mental health fields whose undergraduate training varies.
This book provides information that can be used as a guide to develop a juvenile rehabilitation program for delinquents from the ground up, or depending on the reader’s needs, it can be used to strengthen some component of an existing program. Regardless of who the reader is or what role that person plays in rehabilitating juvenile offenders, there is something in this book for everyone.
Informing Juvenile Justice Reform
The book merges some of the hottest topics that currently grip the attention of Americans: the mental health of juvenile delinquents, criminal justice expenditures, families, education, and violence. This trend has generated changes in the juvenile justice system, causing many states, like Rhode Island, to search for less expensive and more effective alternatives to incarcerating juveniles. This study helps to specify which types of programs may work best to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents, and it provides a how-to guide for structuring these initiatives.
Informing Future Research
Taking an empirically based approach to juvenile justice reform, this research can inform future studies and provide rationale for more careful methods that lead to more valid results. In the rush to publish or perish in academia, excellence in research often suffers. Funding agencies are reluctant to pay for projects as large and time-consuming as this undertaking was. This study exemplifies how careful and targeted research methods yield the most accurate and useful results.
As a Secondary Text for Undergraduates and Graduate Students
As a secondary text for undergraduate students, this book provides the next best thing to a hands-on practicum with juvenile delinquents. It allows students to see the theories that they learn about from primary texts coming to life. It is easy to read and follow. It also provides practical skills for interviewing juvenile delinquents that can be practiced in the classroom. This book will be very useful to students taking courses in psychology, counseling, sociology, criminology, policing, law, social work, family violence, and public policy. Furthermore, the book is useful to students doing internships in programs like Ocean Tides, and it should be read before participating in these programs.
The book can be used for both theory and practice courses in clinical psychology, social work, counseling, marital and family therapy, and criminal justice. Students doing externships working with delinquents and adult prisoners will also find it helpful.
As a Training Manual for Practitioners
Designing and implementing an effective rehabilitation program for juvenile delinquents is no easy matter. It involves an educational component, life skills training, increasing interpersonal skills, developing vocational skills and good work habits, and improving self-esteem and self-efficacy. Eliminating antisocial and other disruptive behavior requires not only careful planning but considerable trial-and-error implementation over time to see what works. The description of the procedures developed in this program provides useful and practical guidelines for anyone working with delinquents and other young men engaging in disruptive behavior.
Practical Tips For Practitioners
This book offers practical tips for practitioners at every level of the development and implementation of reform in juvenile rehabilitation programming. For policy makers and state legislators, it offers practical rationales for developing these programs and uses empirically based evidence of their effectiveness. The book provides a complete description of each component of a successful program for delinquents that state-level juvenile justice commissions can model. Likewise, policy makers learn how much money can be saved in juvenile justice expenditures by developing programs like Ocean Tides, and how these programs ultimately decrease demands on the adult correctional system by lowering rates of recidivism.
Program organizers and administrators will learn about potential political hurdles they may confront in developing an effective rehabilitative or educational program for delinquents. They will learn how each component of a good program should work—the rationale, philosophies, and reasons for each component of the program. Finally, this research underscores the fact that simply removing a child from a bad household may not be enough. Furthermore, these juveniles need functional surrogate parents who foster corrective emotional experiences, and this book explains what a program like that should contain.
Every chapter in this book provides tips for mental health professionals and for program consultants. Treatment methods and prevention programs that are developed by clinical counselors need to be guided by a broad-based theoretical understanding of why juveniles commit crimes. This involves identifying patterns of trauma that predate the delinquent behavior, such as family violence. These experiences create strain in a child’s life that must be relieved before further treatment can be effective. Social workers and Department of Children, Youth and Families employees often conduct home visits and can spot signs of parental violence and child abuse, but only if they are aware of their dangers.
This book provides detailed information about how these programs should be structured and what they can offer. Consultants who are hired to design specific components of a program can use the descriptions in this book as a model for program design. They will learn how their work will fit into the overall program design and philosophy. Consultants can learn what they can do to improve the functioning of programs that already exist. The book details their roles and responsibilities, and provides a how-to guide for providing in-service training, moderating staff meetings, conducting workshops, mediating conflicts and disagreements among staff, advising and consulting administrators and department heads, and evaluating administrators. The book provides how-to strategies for developing more successful communication strategies with delinquents so that mental health providers can detect and prevent problems such as suicide or violent behavior, and prescribe more targeted medications. They can obtain real information directly from their delinquent clients that is accurate for guiding rehabilitation and treatment strategies. They can get valid information from clients about what is going on at home to provide more effective outpatient counseling. Finally, this book provides real-life stories that help practitioners to see the potential outcomes of a program like Ocean Tides.
Staff members who are already working in rehabilitation programs can learn what the overall goals should be for these programs and learn about how their different efforts fit into the larger whole. Staff in different parts of the program will learn what their roles are and how to do their jobs most effectively within the whole system. Staff members who work with delinquents can use these strategies to reduce conflict.
Police who read this book will benefit from learning about delinquent boys, what their families are like, and their characteristics, in order to understand how to deal with them. For example, a lot of the Ocean Tides boys hope to grow up and be police officers themselves, which could potentially place the officer in a mentoring relationship with young offenders. Police need to understand that young offenders are often also victims of abuse. Exposure to
Family court judges need to know what a program has to offer before they know who would benefit the most from the programs they have to offer, and they need to know what works best. They typically make the decision where to place a juvenile delinquent, so it is imperative that they are able to identify and recognize effective components of a rehabilitation program in order to make the best decision possible for the delinquent.
This book provides researchers with a clear explanation of the study methods, and describes the database and its construction so that other researchers may be guided by example. Researchers will also benefit from learning how to interview delinquents to foster more valid information. Researchers learn the benefits of using multiple sources of information on juvenile delinquents. For example, this research finds that nearly 5% of violent juveniles would have been incorrectly categorized as nonviolent in the research if only arrest records were used to measure violence.
Anyone who comes in contact with children at school—teachers, nurses, and counselors—needs to increase awareness about the dangers of child abuse and exposure to
A Synopsis of What Follows
Chapter 1—Ocean Tides Rising: History
The first chapter in the book is a brief history of juvenile delinquency in the United States and in Rhode Island from the 1850s until the establishment of the Ocean Tides program in 1975. The discussion chronicles the events and policies, both nationally and locally, that shaped and characterized how juvenile delinquents were conceptualized and treated. The authors describe the specific events in Rhode Island that led to the founding of Ocean Tides.
Chapter 2—Currents: Who the Boys Are
This chapter is a description of the population in residence in the Ocean Tides program from 1975 through 2006, including the intake criteria for acceptance into the program. The authors describe the nature of the database, its development, and the sources of information used for constructing the database. The chapter contains demographic and other information about the delinquents and their families, including ethnic and racial composition of the residents and demographic changes over time; information about substance abuse, child abuse, abandonment and rejection, and the residents’ and their families’ criminal charges; and information about behavior and attitudes, psychological characteristics, school performance, career aspirations, and interests among the residents.
Chapter 3—Explaining the Ocean Tides: Theory
In this chapter, the authors explain why and how juveniles become delinquent. After a brief summary of criminological theory, the chapter provides a more in-depth description of Robert Agnew’s general theory of crime. This includes a discussion of the major components that contribute to crime, such as cultural influences, outside factors, and strain in the five life domains. Juveniles engage in delinquency to relieve the strains brought about by exposure to violence between parental figures, child abuse (negative experiences), and the absence of positive parenting (removal of something positive) in the presence of reinforcements and minimal constraints. Through the fostering of positive relationships, the Ocean Tides program serves as surrogate parents and removes the adolescent from negative experiences at home, thus relieving at least two forms of strain that can lead to violence. Empirical evidence presented in the following chapter supports this theory.
Chapter 4—An Undertow: Personal Child Abuse Victimization and Exposure to Parental Interpersonal Violence
In Chapter 4, the authors explore the role of family and the effects of domestic violence in contributing to the development of delinquent behavior. In particular, the discussion focuses on the long-term effects of exposure to
Chapter 5—Charting a Course: The Program at Ocean Tides
Chapter 5 provides a description of the Ocean Tides program and its three main components: the school, social services department, and supervision of residential life. In addition to describing the organization and administration of the program, the authors discuss the role of the treatment teams, staff and their roles and duties, and how the program works on a daily basis.
Chapter 6—Calming Seas: Managing the Ocean Tides Residents
Chapter 6 provides additional information about how the Ocean Tides program works. Information includes the underlying treatment philosophies (Reality Therapy and the LaSallian Heritage) and detailed descriptions of the various interventions used by teachers, social services counselors, and residential staff. The authors describe how special programs, such as anger management, social skills training, and sexual offender treatment, are integrated into the program. Relevant data from the research project are integrated into the discussion.
Chapter 7—Navigating the Waters: The Role of the Clinical Psychologist as a Consultant
In this chapter, the authors explain how a clinical psychologist can be used as a consultant to the program and how this role changes as a program develops. Specific functions include staff support and supervision; leading and moderating full staff meetings; providing in-service training and workshops; mediating conflicts and disagreements among staff; contributing to staff development of policy and procedures; conducting interview-based psychological evaluations of residents; and conducting annual evaluations of department heads and other administrators.
Chapter 8—At the Helm: Interviewing Adolescent Male Juvenile Delinquents
In the eighth chapter, the authors describe key issues and difficulties associated with conducting evaluation interviews with delinquent boys, including how to evaluate suicidal potential and risk of violent behavior. The authors discuss both underlying philosophy and specific techniques involved in interviewing and describe a “curiosity model” of interviewing. They explain that the interview is integral to establishing trusting relationships with delinquents and is necessary for directing rehabilitation strategies that are specific to the juvenile’s needs.
Chapter 9—Stem the Tide: Case Histories
Chapter 9 includes case histories of six of the Ocean Tides residents along with a couple of the students’ essays written in their own words about their own lives. It provides a unique glimpse into the personal triumphs and obstacles these boys have faced in their young lives.
Chapter 10—Sailing Home: Final Thoughts
This chapter summarizes the main focuses of the research and the book and identifies its significant conclusions. A section in this chapter is devoted to explaining what changes have occurred at Ocean Tides since 2007, and policy and research strategies are discussed.
Reference
- Annie E. Casey Foundation. (2014). Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative (Web Page). Retrieved from http://www.aecf.org/work/juvenile-justice/jdai/