"The Juvenile Awareness Project Help" article.

           I’ve recently read the article talking about The Juvenile Awareness Project Help (JAPH). I found this article interesting because several months ago, I’ve actually seen a TV show where the JAPH project was demonstrated and showed in a real life, in real circumstances and with real people. For the first minutes of watching it, I couldn’t realize what is going on and what the high school students are doing in the prison and why they get insulted and even humiliated in some cases by inhabitant of this prison. After reading the article about this TV program, everything became clearer for me.

To be more precise, the JAPH is an experiment that takes the juvenile offenders into a prison in New Jersey to scare them straight into stopping living a life of crime. According to the article, the goal of the program is to change the attitudes and behaviors of these kids to prevent any further regression in them in hope that seeing the prisoners yell at them and threaten them will make them desire to change their behaviors and attitudes toward crime. Nonetheless, like any program, this one has its weaknesses, which this particular report is set to examine. Its research question is therefore what is the value is drawbacks of JAPH.

The main objective of the JAPH project is that the kids will be turned away from delinquent behaviour when they see what that behaviour will cost them, yet the key hypothesis of the Rutgers researchers is that JAPH actually has no effect, either psychologically or behaviourally, on the juveniles attending. They basically believed that the so-called delinquent behaviour actually arises from many different factors, thus it’s wrong to suggest that a short visit to a prison can offset the long-term effects of all these other variables. In other words they hypothesised that JAPH has no effect on the attitudes of the juveniles attending it. In the second report, hypothesis went on to say that JAPH has no effect on the juveniles participating in terms of deterring their future delinquent behaviour.

The findings have shown that over 70% of the 81 juveniles that were designated for the program had a low probability of delinquency and only 8% had a high probability. Also, not one of the 81 juveniles has ever been in a training school. However, other findings have shown that there were more juveniles getting in trouble in terms of subsequent offences of those who attended the project than those who didn’t.  Researchers conclude that the success rates presented in the documentary are misleading since many of the referrals to the program had never been in trouble with the law in the first place. This raises some issues about the accuracy of the program, since if the juveniles don’t become delinquent, JAPH can’t quiet be responsible for it.