Ten Ways to Reduce Detention Population

“Juvenile detention is regularly overlooked, maligned, and misunderstood. Its embattled condition is best described as severely abused and neglected. It is underfunded, understaffed, crowded and largely ignored.”¹ “Detention caseloads increased 38 percent between 1987 and 1996. The increase in the number of delinquency cases handled by the courts has driven the growth in the number of juveniles in the detention system. In 1987, 1.2 million delinquency cases were disposed of in juvenile courts. By 1996, this number had risen 49 percent, to almost 1.8 million. This increase in the volume of juveniles in the justice system resulted in a 38 percent increase in the number of delinquency cases that involved the use of detention. The number of juvenile delinquency cases detained in 1996 was 89,000 more than in 1987. This has resulted in increased demand for juvenile detention bed space across the country.”² “Changes in statutes allowing more detainable offenses have significantly increased the number of youths admitted to regional detention centers.”³ “Although minority youth constituted about 32 percent of the youth population in the country in 1995, they represented 68 percent of the juvenile population in secure detention…⁴     

WINNING THE BATTLES AND THE WARS. An evaluation of comprehensive,community-based delinquency prevention programming

This three-year program evaluation investigated the primary prevention aspects of Youth Assistance (YA), a community-based program of the Oakland County Probate Court providing casework and prevention services. The activities studied included parent education sessions, supervised teen recreation, summer camp scholarships, skill building activities, and a one-to-one mentorship program. The goals of the study were to determine how effectively the program succeeded in mobilizing community volunteers, and to examine whether the incidence of neglect and delinquency had been reduced as a result of children and parents participating in one or more of these primary prevention activities. Ethnographical as well as quasi-experimental approaches were used. The following results are highlighted: YA primary prevention services do serve “at risk” populations in the community; overall, participation in the YA activities had positive effects on the participants, such as improved communication skills, increased respect for authority, and more use of positive discipline techniques; 92% of the primary prevention program participants had no subsequent contact with YA or the Court; the program is cost-effective. The study also confirmed that volunteers are an essential part of the success of a community-based prevention program. The study resulted in a number of specific recommendations which will be implemented over the next few years in order to continuously improve the program.     

The Development of the Scout Movement in Nigeria

The writer of this article is Chief Scout Commissioner for Nigeria,where a West African Jamboree is being held at Lagos in February.Although Scouting has not yet been developed in the region toany great extent, the possibilities are great, and it is interestingto recall that M. Eboué made specific reference to itssocial value in Africa in one of the last of his memoranda.     

Why the 1980s Measures of Racially Polarized Voting Are Inadequate for the 1990s

In this paper, we attempt to clarify some of the confusion that surrounds the measurement of racially polarized voting. This clarification is necessary because the determination of whether or not racially polarized voting exists is often a critical component of the evidence presented in Voting Rights Act (Section 2) litigation. We first show that the correlation coefficient should never be used to measure voting polarization by relating the statistic to the individual behavior that it is supposed to be describing. We then compare the estimates of polarized voting that are provided by other commonly used measures with individual behavior in order to show that the Voting Rights disputes of the 1990s will require different and more carefully specified measures than are currently in use.