The Glen Mills School-Netherlands

Abstract

In my country, Holland, the Judicial Youth Facilities (JYF), is overseen by the Department of Justice and detains more then 7,000 youth offenders each year. We also have privately owned Youth Care Facilities (YCF), which service children who have been ordered by the courts to be held in a secured residential facility or a halfway house, where offenders are required to be at all times, unless they are participating in an approved activity such as school or work. The main goal of these facilities is to prevent recidivism, by providing offenders with access to the information, cognitive skills, and training that will enable them to return to the community and become productive citizens. The re-entry process for the youth offender is also overseen by the Justice Department, which has mandated that the Bureau of Youth Care manage youth parole services, with these services often being contracted out to private companies. In response to the number of youth going into and being released from detention, we are experiencing an increase in the number of privately owned bureaus that claim that they are re-entry specialists and have a successful model for reconnecting young people to their communities after detention. For most of these bureaus, their interaction with the youth offender does not begin until after the offender is released from detention; which means little if any connection is made between what took place during the offenders detention and what the re-entry specialist thinks is best for the specific offender. Many of these offenders are returned to their original communities and placed into situations where it is almost impossible for them not to reconnect with their old group and/or to repeat their old behaviour. While there is no real evidence of success, government funding continues to be available and new bureaus continue to pop-up, seeking out a piece of the re-entry pie. One privately owned YCF that used a different approach is the Glen Mills School, a facility for behavioural change for children who committed their crimes