The target population will include students from different schools regardless of their age, sex, and ethnicity. The total number of respondents is estimated to be 60 people. This amount of respondents seems to be appropriate to make relevant conclusions and suggest the corresponding recommendations to enhance the situation with juvenile offenders. In particular, quota sampling was selected to meet the criteria that were mentioned above.
In the context of needs assessment, it seems essential to employ the approach of recidivism prevention. According to Ryan, Abrams, and Huang (2014), “those who committed the graver crimes and therefore received more restrictive punishments could have other qualities that make them more likely to commit additional crimes” (p. 10). Therefore, it is of great importance to identify factors that make young people commit new crimes. The attempt to predict and analyze these factors can significantly contribute to the reduced level of recidivism.
At this point, the individual motives of every youth offender need to be accurately considered and properly classified to eliminate them in the future, thus promoting the decreased levels of crime among adolescents. Another crucial point that is to be taken into account relates to the timeliness of risk categorization (Ryan et al., 2014). This means that the needs assessment should be conducted at any stage of the juvenile justice system. Precisely speaking, adjudication, diversion, and disposition stages should focus on the adequate evaluation of a juvenile offender’s predisposition to recidivism and his or her relevance either for a diversion program or a community-based alternative.
However, along with youth crime prevention, it is necessary to create an appropriate environment so that school students feel comfortable and were not forced to commit a crime for one or another reason where the latter can involve lack of money, poor relationships within the family or with friends, and other factors. In this regard, the current environmental issues are to be evaluated and improved in the result of the research. In particular, the presence or absence of caring parents per se, living conditions, neighborhood appropriateness, and other factors concerning the environment need to be assessed.
It is essential to pinpoint the fact that primarily a strengths-based approach will be applied to reveal the core issues and improve on them (Hamilton, Fitzgibbon, & Carr, 2016). The delinquent or deviant conduct of youths requires the implementation of the strengths-based approach as it offers a conceptual overview of adolescents as well as their family and presumes effective collaboration with them that, in its turn, is likely to lead to the increased awareness of both youths and their close environment. Hamilton et al. (2016) state that it is critical to choose the proper way to communicate with the identified vulnerable population. Therefore, a range of practice tools to be used by practitioners need to be evaluated to provide the most effective analysis.
All in all, it can be essential to employ a balanced approach that will comprehensively embrace risk factors that are likely to cause recidivism, necessary practice tools, and responsiveness ways to react to the needs of young offenders. At this point, the community resources are to be evaluated and then used in work with young people. The approaches that were mentioned above are likely to provide essential grounds for effective communication with young offenders so that to convince them that there is a better choice than crime commission.
References
Hamilton, C., Fitzgibbon, W., & Carr, N. (2016). Punishment, youth justice and cultural contingency: Towards a balanced approach. Youth Justice, 16(3), 226-245.
Ryan, J. P., Abrams, L. S., & Huang, H. (2014). First-time violent juvenile offenders: Probation, placement, and recidivism. Social Work Research, 38(1), 7-18.