Co-ordination of Services as a Means of Delinquency Prevention

Abstract

The South Central Youth Project was based on the assumption that juvenile delinquency is part of the child- rearing problem of the whole community. Prevention there fore demands co-operation and co-ordination among all the organizations of the community related to youth and aimed at the creation of a healthy community climate. Accordingly, this Project did not consist in the establishment of a new agency but was rather a co-ordinated effort on the part of law- enforcement, health, and welfare agencies and of public schools in an area of high delinquency. The Project focused on de tection of the beginning signs of delinquency and on finding concrete means to improve interagency communication and co-operative efforts. On the basis of its experience, the follow ing suggestions for carrying on such work in the future were made: (1) Establish Practitioner Committees from sufficiently small geographic areas to meet regularly to make plans for cases needing concerted community effort. (2) Increase the flexibility of established agency structures and functions. (3) Realize the importance and difficulty of the "aggressive case work" and "street-corner group work" approaches and train selected practitioners for this task. (4) Increase the use of community education; co-ordinate the work of all agencies to change community culture. (5) Strengthen community efforts capable of early detection and attention to juvenile problems as for instance the services of school social workers and youth agencies using qualified professional personnel.