Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
18 years old, providing them with more positive experiences, advice, support and
friendship.
Two successful interventionist policies involve
families
, usually with teenage
children with severe behaviour problems that also involve extensive monitoring
by skilled personnel. The Functional Family Therapy Programme (FFT) is mainly
a short term intervention with specific techniques designed to make families and
teens with truancy bullying and delinquency problems understand the problems and
consequences of their actions, and to motivate them to resolve the results of nega-
tive behaviours by providing structure to their interactions with their children and
how to set limits on anti-social behaviours. The Multisystemic Therapy Programme
(MST) applies a number of techniques to focus on the negative conditions that ex-
ist in the environment of delinquent youths and their families in order to solve the
problems before they escalate, focusing on disengagement from deviant peers and
helping parents build a positive social support network
A more general programme addresses children in
foster care
. Multidimensional
Treatment Foster Care (MTFC) recognizes that large fostering institutions have
rarely been successful in treating children with severe behaviour and delinquen-
cy problems. So the programme places such individuals in carefully selected and
trained foster families, with constant support from various trained personnel who
are skilled in behaviour therapy, to create a caring and supportive environment
All these ten secondary behavioural programmes have been shown to have a
very successful track record in reducing the levels of subsequent anti-social and
criminal behaviour, although it must be admitted that this does not mean that all
individuals enrolled respond in a positive way. Also all were cost-effective in the
sense that the costs of the programmes were far less than the taxpayer costs involved
in subsequent expenses for welfare, health and justice actions, although Greenwood
(
2004
) shows the ratios do vary from programme to programme. Most rehabilita-
tive approaches rarely have enough long term funding for these crucial programmes
in most cities, while the effectiveness of many has been shown to be reduced by
insufficient training for the key personnel involved in the various interventions.
Different jurisdictions have developed alternatives to these general programmes.
For example, in Calgary in 2010 there was a 25 % decline in youth crime over the
previous 5 year average. Police attribute this change not only to their own actions
but to partnerships with school boards involving two agencies in particular that
are financed by the provincial Safe Communities Innovation Fund. One agency is
the new Multi-Agency School Support Team that identifies negative behaviour in
children 5-12 years old and gets them help before they are involved in crime. The
other is the Serious Habitual Offender Programme for older children that places
them under strict police supervision and only prosecutes them if they re-offend. In
addition, the 2003 Provincial Youth Criminal Justice Act encouraged alternative
measures for those charged with minor crimes, such as curfews and mandatory help
in community projects, instead of moving offenders into juvenile detention centres
where they socialise with other offenders and often learn new criminal behaviours.
However tougher penalties are given for serious offences. What is clear from the
general success of these programmes is that there are positive alternatives to the
