Ocean Tide Chapter Summary

A constant theme in the United States in the legal system is that criminals should be punished and the reasons for their crimes are rarely addressed. The Ocean Tides program is an innovative system rather than punishing juveniles it is an approach that hopes to rehabilitate adjudicated boys in Rhode Island within a year. Typically the more severe a crime is, the longer the criminal is sent away for. At the Ocean Tides program, 1 year is retrospectively the time that is used to help criminals readjust so once they complete the program their behavior will be better. The history of things begins on a dark road and that is people seek change, which for the juvenile system ultimately began in 1961. Although the juvenile court in Rhode Island was
Although many of the tables were interesting I felt the most compelled to the tables regarding child abuses, most recent charges and hobbies. Table A.6 shows the family structure of the Ocean Tide boys and I find it extremely interesting that 46% of the boys experienced emotional abuse from their biological fathers and 20% from their biological mothers. (p.29). Table A.6 shows that no boys lived in a single family home with just their biological father so one can infer from this that the emotional abuse is the most prominent in 2 parent households, probably under patriarchy. On pg. 144 Agnew talks about parenting practices and I think the author’s found such high emotional abuse rates among biological parents is because of poor parenting skills. Agnew (2005), pg. 146 infers that many parents possess traits like irritability and low self control and are more prone to engage in abusive parenting practices because their motivation and ability to engage in good parenting are reduced. Although I do not think violation of probation should be considered a charge, it is the most common violation alongside breaking and entering for the ocean tide boys according to Table A.10. The Ocean Tide boys committed 62.6% nonviolent crimes and 36.8% of violent crimes (p.30). My assumption is that the authors found these numbers because crime often has short term effects according to Agnew (pg. 94). Violation of probation is probably related to trying to see friends or drug activity and other nonviolent offenses like theft and burglary involve gaining money or valuable things. These are all short term and come with penalty which is why nonviolent crimes are double in percentage compared to violent