Good Essay About The Concept Of Positive Peer Culture

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The Juvenile Justice System is focused entirely on the rehabilitation and treatment of the juvenile offenders. The punishment that is imposed by the Juvenile court indicates which program will be applied, for how long and where the young offender will be subjected to the respective program. From the middle of the twentieth century the treatment in the correctional facilities has passed through approximately four stages, e. g. “the Rehabilitation is not adequate” stage; the stage when “nothing works”; the stage when “only some treatments work”, and the last stage when “the various programs and innovations work. The juveniles that participated to the various stages of treatment are overwhelmed and confronted with the variety of methods of treating, saving, remodeling, rehabilitating, etc. in other words “recycling” them. The methods vary from individual to group treatments.
The Concept of Positive Peer Culture (PPC) that is very well described by Bartollas, C. and Miller, S., in Chapter 12th of their book Juvenile Justice in America, shows a modern approach to the subject. The project was developed by Harry Vorrath and his associates as a prolongation of the most popular at that time and adopted by almost all states program Guided Group Interaction (GGI) and was accepted and applied to the juvenile justice system of the states of Missouri, West Virginia and Michigan.
It is described in the book Juvenile Justice in America in the following way: “The main philosophy of PPC is to “turn around” the negative peer culture and to mobilize the power of the peer group in a positive way.” (Bartollas, C., & Miller, S., 2014) PPC emphasizes on positive behavior and the use of positive words in the conversations as “intelligent”, “improving”, “great” and avoiding at the same time words with negative meaning. The program is constructed on meeting that continue ninety minutes long and take place five times a week. The main characteristics of the group are openness and trust.
As a conclusion it must be noticed that for the full evaluation of PPC more researches are necessary but still it is the most promising model for treating, changing, rehabilitating and correcting juvenile offenders.

Reference

Bartollas, C., & Miller, S., (2014) Juvenile Justice in America, 7th edition, Web Retrieved from www.online.vitalsource.com/#/books/9780133140774