Of residential treatment centers, Knopf (1984) reports that of all treatments offered to juvenile delinquents, it is the residential program that has received most of the public and professional focus. He further states that treatment efficacy of residential programs is quite diverse and that few claim unequivocal success. Knopf makes the point that high success rates are absolutely necessary for residential programs because their cost is so much more than existing training schools.
Many residential facilities provide family therapy in an effort to remediate parent-child interactions that may be causative in producing delinquency. According to Parsons and Alexander (1973), family therapy can be successfully used to alter the destructive communication patterns that are often typical of delinquents' families. Indeed, in their study of a family therapy program that also used behavior approaches such as modeling, the authors found that by the end of therapy, family interaction patterns were significantly modified in the direction of communication patterns more characteristic of normal families.
Training schools are an alternative treatment intervention for delinquency. According to Chandler (1973), the effectiveness of training was demonstrated in his study of chronically delinquent boys. In the study, training consisted of writing, acting and videotaping brief lifelike skits in order to educate delinquents in role-taking skills. All boys received training in three-hour sessions aimed at getting teens to see themselves as others did and teaching them to overcome their social role-taking skills deficit.
Findings of the study showed that upon completion of training, when compared to age-matched controls, delinquent youths were significantly better in measures of both social competence and cooperation. In addition, follow-up data collected 18 months after training showed a significant decrease in delinquent behavior.
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