PROGRAM TYPES

In keeping with previous research first presented in OJJDP's Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders (Howell, 1995), the programs were grouped into five categories organized into life domains that mimic the organization of risk and protective factors. There are several types of programs within each domain. The program types, however, are not mutually exclusive and do not always fit neatly within each sphere. These domains include Community, School, Family, Peer, and Individual. The program types, organized by domain, include the following:

Community
Community- and Problem-Oriented Policing are policing strategies designed to prevent crime by reducing opportunities and increasing the risks for engaging in criminal behavior through mutually beneficial ties between police and community members.

Afterschool/Recreation programs offer rewarding, challenging, and age-appropriate activities in a safe, structured, and positive environment. They may reduce delinquency by way of a socializing effect through which youth learn positive virtues such as discipline or simply reduce the opportunity for youth to engage in delinquency.

Other Community Strategies include an array of community strategies that seek to prevent crime and violence. They include community mobilization efforts, educational campaigns, and the use of civil remedies.

School
Prevention Curricula provides instruction through curricula to students to teach them factual information, increase their awareness of social influences to engage in misbehavior, expand their repertoires for recognizing and appropriately responding to risky or potentially harmful situation (e.g., drug use, gang involvement, violence), increase their appreciation for diversity in society, improve their moral character, improve conflict resolution skills, and encourage accountability.

Behavior Management concentrates directly on changing behaviors and uses feedback or positive or negative reinforcement to change behavior. These strategies generally rely on using a range of cognitive-behavioral approaches to challenge--and ultimately change--maladaptive behavior.

School/Classroom Environment programs seek to reduce or eliminate problem behaviors by changing the overall context in which they occur. These strategies may include interventions to change the decision-making processes or authority structures (building school capacity); redefining norms for behavior and signaling appropriate behavior through the use of rules (setting norms for behavior); reorganizing classes or grades to create smaller units, continuing interaction, or different mixes of students, or to provide greater flexibility in instruction (classroom organization); and the use of rewards and punishments and the reduction of down time (classroom management).

Academic Skills Enhancement programs use instructional methods designed to increase student engagement in the learning process and hence increase their academic performance and bonding to the school (e.g., cooperative learning techniques and "experiential learning" strategies).

Truancy Prevention is designed to promote regular school attendance through one or more strategies including an increase in parental involvement, the participation of law enforcement, the use of mentors, court alternatives, or other related strategies.

Family
Parent Training programs involve educating parents on specific management skills. This highly structured approach generally includes parents only, in small groups led by a skilled trainer or clinician. The program typically follows a curriculum guide and often includes video presentations of effective and ineffective ways of parenting; short lectures and discussions to identify parenting principles; interactive exercises; role-plays of direct practice in the parenting behavior to be changed; charting and monitoring of parenting and children's behavior and assignment of homework.

Peer
Mediation helps students examine a problem or conflict through the use of a trained peer mediator. The mediator recommends changes and compromises, and helps the youth develop a mutually agreed upon solution in a democratic fashion. The peer mediation process may use several methods of instruction including problem solving, active listening, communicating, and identifying points of agreement.

Individual
Mentoring involves a relationship over a prolonged period of time between two or more people where an older, caring, more experienced individual provides help to the younger person as he or she goes through life. The goal of mentoring is to support the development of healthy individuals by addressing the need for positive adult contact and, thereby, reducing risk factors and enhancing protective factors for problem behavior.

Vocational/Job Training programs address youth crime and unemployment by providing participants with social, personal, and vocational skills and employment opportunities to help them achieve economic success, avoid involvement in criminal activity, and subsequently increase social and educational functioning.

Leadership and Youth Development programs prevent problems behaviors by preparing young people to meet the challenges of adolescence through a series of structured, progressive activities and experiences that help them obtain social, emotional, ethical, physical, and cognitive competencies. This approach views youth as resources and builds on their strengths and capabilities to develop within their own community. It focuses on the acquisition of adequate attitudes, behaviors, and skills.

Prevention Services are designed to prevent problem behaviors by providing intensive and coordinated behavioral health services (e.g., mental health services, substance abuse prevention and treatment services, comprehensive services) to at-risk youth and their families. By integrating the risk and protective models, the new Title V delinquency prevention model can more adequately identify at-risk youth and then provide them with methods of healthy development to combat the likelihood of developing problem behavior.