COLLEGE STATION – In Texas, half of the juvenile offenders become repeat offenders.
This startling statistic is the reason for the Strengthening Our Capacity to Care program, which was originated in 1996 in Texas, according to Dr. Linda Ladd, Texas Cooperative Extension family development specialist and director of the SOCC program.
“At-risk youth need an opportunity to increase their life skills and performance in school through education and positive interaction with adults,” she said.
But these positive, life-changing opportunities should not be limited to school, Ladd said. “Parents need to be involved in the education of their children to improve family communication and behaviors.”
In fact, she added, everyone needs to be involved. “Community efforts to reduce juvenile crime are most effective when these efforts bring together multiple agencies with the common goal of increasing the positive behaviors of youth,” Ladd said.
“In addition, community programs are most successful when they consider the needs of the youth in terms of that youth being a member of a family system and the community system as well.”
In other words, encouraging kids to change their attitudes and their lives really does “take a village” parents aren’t the only adults who can make a positive difference in the life of a child.
And that’s where SOCC comes in.
Developed through a partnership between the Texas Juvenile Probation Commission and Texas Cooperative Extension, SOCC began as a three-year life skills education plan working with more than 800 mostly rural at-risk kids and young offenders in 75 Texas counties, Ladd said.
Using the Texas 4-H curriculum and National 4-H Juried Curriculum which included such varied topics as small animals, nutrition and electricity each county chose its own life-skills program.
Some of those programs included such activities as:
– A demolition project in Hutchinson County, in which eight students who were caught skipping school were given permission to skip school in order to clear an old foundation off the SOCC project garden site.
– A sports fishing program in Tyler County, sponsored by a local game warden, that features sessions on basic survival skills and fish habitat as well as fishing technique.
– Day-long leadership rally in Leon County that was designed to increase the young participants’ feelings of self-esteem, goal-setting, problem-solving, teamwork and communication. They also learned about etiquette and Internet use. Several of the young participants became honor-roll students for the first time after the rally.
– An entrepreneurial project in Brazos County that included a fishing booth and “Picture with Tweetie and Sylvester” during Happy Healthy Kids Day.
Other counties established different SOCC programs for their youthful participants.
In addition to the program with the youth, more than 350 parents were involved with accompanying parenting education classes, “with the goal of increasing parent understanding and communication with their adolescent children,” Ladd said.
SOCC, with its programs designed both for young people and for their parents, was conducted by more than 75 county Extension agents and 75 juvenile probation officers, as well as numerous volunteers.
The young people who participated were between the ages of 10 and 18.
“The project goal was to prevent re-offending and to effect positive changes in adolescent school performance,” Ladd said.
The result exceeded expectations. In fact, Ladd said, the result was astounding.
“At the end of year one, first-time youthful offenders between ages 10-16 were re-offending at a rate of 16.8 percent, compared with an overall state rate of 52 percent,” she said. So instead of one-half re-offending, only one-sixth did.
When the three-year program was over and the re-offending rate was figured, only 25 percent of the youthful first-time offenders became repeat offenders, she said.
“School officials reported that youth significantly increased their grades, lowered their discipline referrals and joined more positive peer groups as a result of this project,” Ladd said.
The need for SOCC and programs like it is obvious, she said. Not only do these programs improve lives, but they work best for the long run.
“The length of time the youth remained in the program was in direct correlation to the probability that the youth would re-offend,” Ladd stated. “Not surprisingly, the longer the youth remained in the program in an involved way was tied to that youth not re-offending.”
SOCC continues in several Texas counties, even though the initial three-year program ended in 1999, and the results are the same.
Through SOCC and other prevention and education programs, young offenders can learn to improve their own lives and therefore improve life in their communities.
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