"Can I Get Some Harder Work?": Former Juvenile Offenders Narrated Educational Experiences in Juvenile Correctional Facilities

Abstract

In the United States, approximately 48,000 youth are confined in juvenile and adult correctional facilities daily (Sawyer, 2019). Similar to other adolescents, youth in the justice system have a right to high-quality education (Development Services Group, 2019;Steele et al., 2016). Though educational achievement has been discussed as a factor in crime prevention (Abeling-Judge, 2019), there is a higher academic failure rate among justice-involved youth than other children (Johnson, 2018;Kremer & Vaughn, 2019). Only a few states provide comparable educational and vocational programs to incarcerated and non-incarcerated youth (Tannis, 2017). Such shortcomings might contribute to this student demographic's low academic achievement level. The existing literature indicates ABSTRACT Adolescents in the juvenile justice system have a right to comparable education as their peers in public school settings. Interestingly, the existing literature indicates that this is not always the case. This study explored the experience of earning a high school diploma or equivalent in a juvenile correctional facility in Pennsylvania. We framed our study within Bandura's social cognitive theory. This study was guided by the following research question: How do former youth offenders describe their experiences obtaining a high school diploma or equivalent in a juvenile correctional facility in Pennsylvania? This qualitative study employed a hermeneutic phenomenology research design. Purposeful criterion and snowball sampling were used to recruit ten former juvenile offenders in Pennsylvania for this study. We collected data through survey responses, one-on-one semi-structured interviews, and reflexive memos. Our findings indicated that having access to academic support was crucial to the participants' educational experiences. Implications of the study's findings, limitations, and recommendations for future research are also discussed.