Truancy Prevention and Juvenile Delinquency

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how literature shows that adolescents who remain in school and are not frequently truant are less likely than their absent and truant peers to become involved with all kinds of criminal activities. It evaluates the theory that programs designed to reduce truancy behaviors will have the added benefit of reducing juvenile crime or at least reducing the risk that certain young people will become delinquent. It examines the most popular causes of truancy and looks at the factors which may well place a juvenile at risk for delinquency such as poverty, dysfunctional or one-parent families, high neighborhood crime rates and a tacit acceptance of certain forms of deviance, increased peer pressure to join gangs and poor academic performance. It evaluates how although school-based responses may not have the capacity to directly change family behaviors and/or attitudes, they can make a difference in the lives of at-risk students.

From the Paper:

"How effective are truancy programs in reducing risk of delinquency? In Charleston, South Carolina, Police Department Chief Reuben Greenberg, who came to the City in 1982, has implemented a truancy program that puts four uniformed officers on the street, every day, at the beck and call of school administrators reporting a truant student. The truancy patrol, which also involves juveniles themselves, picks up kids age 6 to 17 and then returns them to school. In its first four years, the program was associated with a 27 percent reduction in local juvenile crime - by keeping kids off the streets, and in school, Greenberg stated, crime rates decreased. Most significantly, juvenile-against-juvenile crime during typical school hours also plummeted. Between 1990 and 1994, not a single school-age student was shot, stabbed, beaten up or killed on a city street (Bennett, et al, 1996)."

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