I have read and annotated three articles which look into education systems inside of youth detention centres, also known as youth prisons. Currently, education in youth detention centres is severely lacking, with students at all different levels, crammed into classrooms regardless of special needs, disability, or circumstances. The articles I analyzed looked into two current solutions that are being implemented, even if only on a small scale, as well as the issue overall.
The first article, ‘Academy Engages Incarcerated Youth’ looked into the Maya Angelou Academy, a charter-like school which teaches incarcerated youth, as well as the See Forever Foundation, which operates three charter-like schools for incarcerated youth. Both school systems are operated inside the District of Columbia (i.e. Washington D.C.) and were created in response to the lack of competent education for youth in detention centres, as it is estimated that education reform for these students is a decade or more behind that of standard public education. The school has been extremely successful, but critics say it is too expensive to be implemented nation-wide.
My second article was titled ‘HOPE to Juvenile Offenders’ and told the story of how Ohio State University (OSU) invited five young men from the local juvenile correctional facility to spend the day on campus, learning about college, how to apply, what it was like there, and more. OSU worked with the Ohio Division of Youth Services (DYS) as well as CHEE, an interdisciplinary research and policy centre that promotes education for those who may not think it is available to them. For the five young men, this experience was life-changing, as it allowed them to see the importance of hard work and education, as well as to see their own potential to achieve such things. According to the article, nearly three-fourths of all youth in detention aspire to go to college. By allowing them to see that it is an option for them and offering to help to get them to college, the workers as OSU, DYS, and CHEE gave these young men a path to higher education.
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Problem Solution Summary 1 by Erica is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.