Metamorphosis of Juvenile Correctional Education: Incidental Conception to Intentional Inclusion, The

Journal of Correctional Education, Dec 2004 by Keeley, James H

Federal legislative initiatives in 1968 accelerated the movement for deinstitutionalizing status offenders. A new Federal Agency, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (Binder and Polan, 1991) was established "To assist communities in providing diagnosis, treatment, rehabilitation, and preventive services to youths who are delinquent or in danger of becoming delinquent" (Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Control Act of 1968, p. 462). These ideas had been proposed in the 1967 President's Commission of Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice that specifically called for "individually tailored work with troublemaking youths....and special education (remedial, vocational)" (President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, 1967, p. 83). The ideals of the child savers of the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century did not disappear but were "embodied ...in state legislation describing the purpose of the juvenile court: (1) to provide for the care, protection...to remove from children committing delinquent acts the taint of criminality and the consequences of criminal behavior and to substitute a program of treatment, training and rehabilitation" (Uniform Law Commissioners' Model Juvenile Court 1968 Act, p. 6).

While the goals of the new emphasis were for 'diversion programs,' practical education in the juvenile institutions continued as it had in the reformatories and industrial schools during the first half of the twentieth century.

In the area of juvenile correctional education, the federal government took a major step in correctional education through the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, section 504 (Rider-Hankins, 1992), and the Americans with Disabilities Act. The application of the Americans with Disabilities Act for prison inmates was judicially affirmed in 1998 (Pennsylvania v Yeskey, 2000). The Rehabilitation Act provided a handicapped youth the right to special education services. This was explicitly extended to incarcerate persons under the age of 21 through the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975. The act required "correctional administrators...to pay greater attention to the special education programming of handicapped offenders" (Lewis, et al., 1988, p. 66). This brought a new emphasis to the education in correctional institutions. According to Nelson et al. (1987), this emphasis was finally articulated by the United States Department of Education nine years later in 1984 when a policy statement was issued. It stated "education is a necessity for every American including the more than 2.2 million adults and juveniles who are under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system" (United States Department of Education, 1984, p. 18607).

In 1990, according to Rider-Hankins (1992), education programming in the juvenile institutions was expanded when a national project, Law Related Education, grew as a result of funding from Department of Justice's Office of the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. This initiative corresponded with existing beliefs about correctional education. The belief was that it was "a means of social reintegration upon release [that] is widely accepted by practitioners in the correctional field, as well as being an integral part of society's belief and hope in rehabilitation" (Reffett, 1983, p. 40). To support the increased interest in correctional education, the Department of Education instituted the Office of Correctional Education, which was authorized by the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Amendments of 1991.