Anyone who watches television or views social media platforms has seen viral videos of juvenile offenders and young adults committing crimes without apparent consequences. Some people respond by demanding stiffer penalties and longer jail terms for lawbreakers, even if they are juveniles.
Does sending young offenders to jail effectively reduce crime and make society safer in the long term? Or is there another approach that produces more successful rehabilitation and reduces the rate at which youthful offenders commit new crimes? Research shows that enlisting youthful offenders into well-structured diversion programs results in lower rates of recidivism than prosecuting and jailing them.
Stechschulte Nell, Attorneys at Law in Tampa believe in using the least restrictive and most effective form of structured rehabilitation for young offenders whose behavior is so often driven by emotional trauma, lack of mental healthcare, and lifelong family troubles. This blog explains how diversion programs can interrupt patterns of criminal behavior and redirect young people onto more socially productive paths.
What Are Diversion Programs?
Diversion programs divert criminal charges against eligible defendants out of the normal prosecution system and into an alternative program that offers them an opportunity to obtain needed support to address issues that influence them to act out or break laws.
While Florida counties administer many diversion programs offering first time adult offenders a chance to avoid a criminal conviction by participating in rehabilitative education, counseling, or treatment, we’re focused on juvenile and youthful offender diversion programs in this article.
Why Not Process Juvenile and Youthful Offenders Through Traditional Prosecution and Jail?
Traditional prosecution processes involve the routine arrest, detention, pretrial release, and ultimately a determination of guilt and the imposition of either a period of incarceration or a suspended jail sentence and/or probation. This approach is sometimes advocated by well-intentioned people who think tough love and certain punishment is the best method of correcting a young person’s criminal behavior.
But scientific and social research has revealed that subjecting young offenders to traditional criminal processing and incarceration creates the opposite result and likely facilitates a more antisocial pattern of conduct.
Juvenile and young offenders’ brains have not reached maturity and they do not share the same appreciation for the dangers of risk-taking or the consequences that may follow risky activities. As young people mature, most will age out of lawbreaking behavior.
Research demonstrates that psychological maturity enables young people to achieve these abilities:
- control impulses
- delay gratification
- consider other people’s perspectives
- resist peer pressure, and
- weigh the consequences of their actions.
A study performed by the Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology reported that diverted youthful offenders had a recidivism rate of 31 percent, while those who were processed through traditional prosecution reoffended at a rate of 41 percent.
In an interview with the Boston Globe, a former head of juvenile prosecutions for Suffolk County pointed out that prosecuting juveniles for first or even multiple offenses usually leads to either short or no incarceration and is not necessarily as punishing as law-and-order advocate imagine. What it does do is remove the youth from any existing support and provides no effective corrective guidance.
Long term, structured support diversion programs tailored to meet the needs of the individual youth is a much stronger corrective punishment because it provides help where the young person needs it and includes elements of empathy education.
Traditional prosecution has no ability to reach into the offender’s family, to examine their home environments, and to offer targeted services to the family unit. Diversion programs can achieve that goal if the community invests in mental health services, adult education, substance abuse treatment, and therapy to heal the emotional trauma that may have motivated the offender’s conduct.
Prosecution and Conviction Often Shackles Young People for Life
Without alternatives like diversion programs to provide needed support and correction to young offenders, traditional prosecution’s impact on the offender’s life is far more damaging than the immediate penalty imposed by the court.
Young people who are subjected to the criminal justice system’s processing internalize a self-imposed stigma, believing they are less worthy of acceptance by society and unlikely to succeed through traditional routes. And in many ways, their pessimism is validated when their conviction prevents them from getting a desired job in a promising field.
Those who are incarcerated are exposed to others in jail from whom they learn destructive lessons and be introduced to new forms of illegal conduct.
Diversion Programs in Hillsborough County and Pinellas County
Florida administers a wide range of diversion programs that you or your family members may participate in as an alternative to traditional prosecution. At Stechschulte Nell, Attorneys at Law in Tampa, we work with diversion programs whenever possible to meet our clients’ needs, including pressing local and state prosecutors to agree to divert any case that could benefit young defendants.
Programs exist that offer support for:
- Conflict Resolution,
- Drug, Alcohol & Tobacco Awareness and Prevention,
- Larceny Education,
- Maximum Security Jail Tour,
- Judicial Education,
- Truancy Related Law,
- Medical Examiner’s Class,
- Peer Pressure Class,
- Alcohol Awareness, and
- Controlling Abuse of Drug Prescriptions (CAP)
Mental health and other support services can be made available whenever it may be necessary to assist the recovery and rehabilitation of the client.
Stechschulte Nell Is Here to Support You
Concerned about the best path for a young offender? Ensure their future is protected with the most effective approach. Reach out to Tampa’s leading experts in diversion program cases, Stechschulte Nell, at 813-214-1244. Your youth deserves the best chance for a brighter tomorrow.
