Is Success Just Around The Corner…
Are Life’s Biggest Issues Of Time And Motivation Easily Solved…
Have We Got A Solution To The Teen Epidemic And
Your Fitness Woes…
The Answer Is YES!... Attend A Boot Camp Today!
What are the goals of boot camps?
To give young people a chance to learn how to behave in society; to have an intense program of rehabilitation, in exchange for a shorter prison term. Some government boot camp programs are in exchange for regular prison time.
In other cases, a teenager may have general problems behaving and going to school, so his parents send him to a voluntary boot camp, a "wilderness camp", where youth have a similar experience, but usually with more educational opportunities and more counseling.
The emphasis is to have a program with less general creature comforts, with no social life, meeting the opposite sex, no drugs or alcohol, and no television. In terms of boot camps for arrested juvenile defendants, they emphasize discipline and physical conditioning.
The young people are made to exercise, run, jump, play sports and the like. One program ran boot camps in Mobile, Ala., and two other locations.
The youthful offenders were in the boot camp for 3-months, and after they returned home they were in a program of 6 to 9-months of aftercare, with emphasis on vocational training and employment. In Mobile, Ala., the young people improved their academic performance at a high rate, on average, improving their spelling, language, reading and math by one grade level or more.
Many of the young people in the aftercare were able to get a job and keep it. Unfortunately, a basic problem that authorities and parents have learned from these programs is a key factor in success is attitude.
Most of the young people did concentrate more when they were in the program. They learned physical education and sports skills. Many learned reading, writing, mathematical skills at a high rate. Still the rate of returning to some time of crime was about as high as other programs such as imprisonment.
You may be producing smarter young people, but that doesn't necessarily lower the rate of recidivism. The problem is that many of the young people involved, males and females had to deal with an environment that was and is infested with gangs.
For example, it was important to put the aftercare centers in places that were gang-neutral, like downtown centers or government buildings.
In a certain sense, for many youth what is necessary is another model of the present boot camp, a CCC type camp/or job, like the famous CCC-camps of the 1930s, which gave jobs and hope to youth enmired in the Great Depression. We need to give youth long term hope for skilled jobs and a future.