Part V: Criminal Justice Program Proposal

Part V: Criminal Justice Program Proposal on Juvenile Justice Correction Facilities

Introduction

According to Lipsey et.al, (2010) juvenile justice system in America has faced a long struggle with handing out proper punishments to the juvenile delinquents for violating law. Apart from meting out appropriate punishment the juvenile justice authorities have also failed in bringing about a positive and permanent change in the behaviors of these delinquents who commit law violations. Moreover, the juvenile justice system possesses established methods for controlling and correcting the behaviors of these juvenile delinquents. However, in many cases the effectiveness of these programs is problematic to determine and has a large body of research evidence devoted to addressing this particular issue. More than five percent of individuals younger than nineteen years are detained in custody because of violating laws and committing crimes, in the western countries with over one million in America alone. These individuals are kept in separate prisons or facilities to complete their sentence (Fazel et.al, 2008).

This particular part of the proposal aims to discuss and describe in detail the chosen methodology, or research design chosen for this study. This would include a discussion about the appropriate chosen evaluation method, identifying how information systems would be used to gather evaluation data, the methods used, data collection process and ways to develop and assess stakeholder's feedback. These are discussed in the next section.

Discussion

Type of Evaluation Used

Powell (2006) notes that evaluation research is not easily defined as it is often referred as evaluation research and evaluative research, the concepts of these terms being similar but application could be different depending upon the research context that they are used for. This has led many researchers to consider evaluation research as a specific research method and evaluative research as a strategy that uses different research techniques for evaluative purposes. Nonetheless, this leads to the question regarding the importance of why evaluate a research, to which Wallace & Fleet (2001) have commented that there are numerous reasons for professionals and researchers to critically evaluate their research findings as this helps in reiterating and identifying the limited resources that they will be using, enhance and explain what research that they are doing, increase efficiency and help them to avoid errors. Therefore, they lay great stress upon the fact that a research evaluation must be carefully be planned. For the purposes of this study formative evaluation approach is proposed.

There are numerous forms evaluative researches, but these can be classified under the broad groupings of formative and summative evaluation. As mentioned earlier, this study would employ formative evaluation. This form of evaluations helps improve and strengthen the research object that is being studied through an on-going examination process related to the level of technology, quality, procedures, personnel and inputs used in the project. This allows making suggestions and improvements during the evaluation process. In addition, formative evaluation includes many evaluation types such as needs, evaluative, implementation, structured conceptualization and process evaluation (Socialresearchmethods.net, 2006).

For the purposes of this study, the tool ...