Working Paper 93-36, July 20, 1993(1)
By Robert Hunter
Professor
Sociology Department, University of Colorado - Boulder
(1) This paper is an edited transcript of a talk given by Robert Hunter for the Intractable Conflict/Constructive Confrontation Project on March 2, 1993. Funding for this Project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the University of Colorado. All ideas presented are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Consortium, the University, or Hewlett Foundation. For more information, contact the Conflict Resolution Consortium, Campus Box 327, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0327. Phone: (303) 492-1635, e-mail: crc@cubldr.colorado.edu.
© 1993. Conflict Resolution Consortium. Do not reprint without permission.
Prevention and planning are worth many tons of cure. I am going to talk about prevention, because that's where my activities have been focused for many years. I work a lot with law enforcement officers because we have a program which is used to teach citizenship to students in the schools.2
I'll pass around several handouts. The first is a list of risk factors for delinquency, drug abuse, and other forms of adolescent anti-social behavior: adolescent pregnancy, school drop-outs. Name me any social problem of significance with America's youth and you'll discover the same 11 or 13 risk factors are generally present. (This handout is reprinted as Table I.) Those risk factors, you will see, are multidisciplinary; there are psychological, personality, physiological, and biological risk factors on the chart. Each of them count for four or five percent of the variance in delinquent behavior.
The second handout is a list of significant social antecedents to subsequent use or nonuse of hard drugs, marijuana, and alcohol by youth ages 12 through 17 (included here as Table II). This table tells what happens in the year immediately before a person begins to use drugs or alcohol or marijuana (or does not begin such use). For example, the first issue is friends' use of marijuana. Inevitably, in peer group relationships, if a youngster is hanging out with a peer group that uses marijuana, he will very likely end up using marijuana experimentally himself. On the other hand, if he is hanging out with a bunch of kids that don't approve of it, he probably won't try it. The largest number of elements there are peer-group related elements. The primary cause of juvenile delinquency is association with and dependence on delinquent peers.
Family plays another critical part, but it varies, as you can tell, over the years. The risk factors in Table I have stages. There are some contextual and community factors that are present all the time, but after fourth grade, starting with number three and going up to number eleven, the chart shows a series of factors that can account for delinquent behavior, peaking somewhere at the age of sixteen, somewhere between the ninth and tenth grade.
The last handout is a theoretical formulation entitled, "Why most students are productive and stay out of serious trouble," that we came up with before we knew what all the risk factors were (included here as Figure 1). At the bottom of that figure, you'll notice there are some things one can't do much about if you are a teacher working in the schools. Teachers can't effect what has happened previously in the schools for kids when they get to their classrooms. They can't usually control district policy. They can't necessarily generate parental support all the time, nor can they effect past and present nutrition.
But teachers can control other factors. The teachers in classrooms can indeed use classroom practices which generate more successful interaction among the youngsters that are in a particular class. Certain teaching strategies will produce more successful educational achievement than will others. Teachers can have some influence over governance of school policies and extracurricular activities. They can improve working relationships among school staff, and they can improve school/parent communication.
We try to help teachers control or have some influence over the factors in the middle block--the things that directly influence a student's association with nondelinquent peers and/or susceptibility to delinquent peer influence. These factors include commitment, attachment, involvement, belief,3 equality of opportunity, positive labeling, and successful interaction with mainstream classmates.
We try to persuade educators and administrators, particularly, not to take all the troublemakers and put them into a single class. If that occurs, the troublemakers work together very effectively to nullify any positive efforts that one can make. Troublemaking kids are alienated kids. Together they will reinforce the strength of their alienation.
The most effective advance that we have made in diminishing adolescent delinquency, drug use, and other antisocial behaviors in the last ten years has been to improve communications between the representatives of the justice system and adolescents. When law-related education began, it started with the American Bar Association. They were doing a lot of work with attorneys in the schools. On the first of May, schools almost always had a judge come and talk to the kids about the justice system. But we found that judges didn't represent the justice system very well to kids, nor did attorneys, nor the district attorney. The law enforcement officer in the community inevitably is the most significant representative of American justice to kids--certainly in big cities, but in small ones too.
What we discovered is if we train teachers in effective classroom strategies for maximizing participation of students, particularly in the eighth and ninth grade where civics and social studies are first being taught in a big way, and that if we put a police officer who has been trained in these instructional techniques along with the teachers, and teach them curriculum development and presentation of self in the classroom, pro-active classroom management, and some related things, we can change the almost inevitable negative attitudes of kids towards the police.
Without such a program, even kids that have never had contact with the police, will have negative attitudes towards law enforcement by the time they reach this age of 15 or 16 years. We have found that when we put officers in the classroom co-teaching civics with the social studies teacher, students develop a much healthier understanding of and relationship with police officers in particular and the justice system in general. Who knows better about the First Amendment, about the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, than the law enforcement person? We have found that we can change the attitude of youngsters toward police by having the police interact in the classroom with the teacher. That doesn't mean that the teacher and the police officer have to agree about everything that is going on. They also teach kids how to deal with controversy without using fists. We use some strategies--for instance, critical thinking processes--in which youth get out the facts before they start to express their opinions. This helps avoid yelling matches and leads to rational judgements by the young people.
We are not working with officers who are traditional school resource officers--those who are full-time police-teachers in the classroom. Rather, we work with patrol-level officers, who work on their off-time with teachers in the classroom. We do a lot of research on it, because, ultimately, the city council is going to have to come up with salaries for the police officers on off-time and find some support for school teachers for additional training as well.
We have been working in Colorado with this program since 1982. When it is properly done, we find a systematic reduction of delinquent behavior in kids who have gone through this program. Everywhere we have been, we can show a significant benefit--just counting the value of the number of cars that were not stolen and cut apart, it more than pays for the officer's time. We also find the students bonding with the law enforcement officer as well as with the teacher. We find civics knowledge, not just about police or about the law, but about the government as well, is enhanced, because the kids are fascinated by the real role of the police officer that they learn in the classroom.
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2 The civics curriculum is enhanced by a variation of Law-Related Education developed at CU which offers a program of instruction to build students' conceptual and practical understanding of the law and legal processes.
3 For those that are interested in criminology, you will discover that several of these variables--attachment, involvement and belief--are from Travis Hirschi's social control theory.