MBA 514
August 14, 2012
Introduction
Toni Preckwinkle is the president of Cook County Board of Commissioners. Ms. Preckwinkle is adamant about reducing the populations of the County Cook Jail and the county’s Temporary Detention Center. Ms. Preckwinkle says as she was giving her budget address to a group of commissioners, “detaining defendants in jail while they await trial is very expensive for the county and is detrimental to our communities” (1). For the purpose of this paper the focus will be on the incarceration of children ages 10-18 and how such can be not only detrimental to communities but also to societies and our economy.Something has to change, for some time now a large part of the United States population has bought into the whole concept of placing children who break the law in juvenile correctional facilities. As tax payers we must come to the realization that something needs to change if we want these troubled youth to have a bright future ahead of them and become law-abiding tax payers.
As a country we are spending billions of dollars buying into this whole concept of incarcerating young people, while research shows it is ineffective on rehabilitating the lives of juvenile offenders. Richard A. Mendel reports that a number of studies actually show that the incarceration of juveniles, “actually increases recidivism among youth with lower-risk profiles and less-serious offending histories” (6). In order to put an end to this epidemic of just locking kids up and costing taxpayers billions of dollars we must use some alternative methods when dealing with juvenile offenders. If we want to build a stronger economy for the future we must invest less money into locking kids up and more money in building them back up. According to Mendel view on the incarceration of juveniles, “it wastes vast sums of taxpayers’ dollars. And more than not, it harms the