Forensic Counseling: Is It Possible To Reduce Crime?

Is it possible to reduce crime rates by raising the education of potential criminals? We go to college to get a better education. A better education leads to a better job, which leads to more money. This is the life that people follow and live by in the world today. But little is known about the correlation between schooling and criminal behavior. There are several theoretical reasons for expecting a correlation between education and crime. First, schooling can increase the income of an individual, decreasing the opportunity of criminal behavior. Second, school attendance may reduce crime in the sense that instead of participating in criminal activities they would be getting an education and going to college. Third, punishment is likely to …show more content…
Dr. E. Scott Ryan is a professor, analyst, speaker and a creative writer. In the article Forensic Counseling: A New Approach to School Crime by Dr. E. Scott Ryan, he suggested a new method that does not repeat past treatment and educational failure. We have relied upon mental health professionals to treat crime as if the prisoners had an illness that could be cured. This is known as “the medical model.” The problem with this method is that the offender in trouble is not necessarily a troubled offender. As defined by Dr. E. Scott Ryan, forensic counseling can be understood as counseling offenders. Forensic counseling counters criminal rationalities before they become worse. Educators can be trained in forensic counseling and it is far less expensive to …show more content…
The lowest-performing schools tend to be in the areas where incarceration rates are the highest. An example is Los Angles, California. Los Angles has one of the largest prison population in the country, with more than 170,000 individuals behind bars. Steven Hawkins is an English theoretical physicist and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. In Steven Hawkins 2010 article Poverty Does Not Cause Crime, Hawkins talks about the lowest performing schools. The Los Angeles Unified School District was projecting a deficit of $640 million in the 2010-11 academic year (1999). The result leads district officials to plan to raise class size and lay off thousands of teachers and other school-based staff. In Los Angeles, 67 percent of low-performing schools are in neighborhoods with the highest incarceration rates. By contrast, 68 percent of the city 's high-performing schools are in neighborhoods with the lowest incarceration