Final Draft Synthesis Paper

Kourtney Kramer

Debra Reese

English 2010

Synthesis Paper

How to Better Young Offenders and Their Future

The articles that I chose for this paper are first, Speech and language therapy intervention with a group of persistent and prolific young offenders in a non-custodial setting with previously undiagnosed speech, language and communication difficulties written by authors Juliette Gregory, and Karen Bryan. This articles main focus is testing and categorizing the young offenders in a particular facilitation into groups to test on their level of speech and education.  They study the background of each qualified individual and then create a statistic about young offenders being the way that they are because of a history of speech or language disabilities.  The second article I have chosen is Give young offenders speech and language therapy, urges Labour MP written by Adrian Bailey.  This article then takes it the next step forward by talking about the ability of those young offenders to go on and get jobs to have the possibility of a normal future not jeopardized by the speech or language difficulties they had as a child.  They want to help improve the application policies for those who have committed a felony.  I will be connecting these two articles through out my paper because I believe that they go hand in hand.  In order for the programs that help them improve or remove their speech or language impediments we need to give them those opportunities and each article helps us resolve this.

Can we trust the young offenders of today to work for our companies, and our business’?  Adrian Bailey, talks about how in order to help reduce the number of young offenders of reoffending, we need to give them the opportunity to work.  Bailey states that if we strengthen their speech and language therapy that we can help better them to be hard workers, and to be more determined.

We would start by looking at who was at risk of becoming an offender because of the way they were raised, who they were and the kind of environment they were raised in. In my very first article they preformed studies on each individual in a juvenile center and tested individuals to see where their education level was at, to reinstate their suspicion about speech and language troubles being the cause of teens that become young offenders.  To better categorize each of them and to also see if they were eligible to be in a working environment they categorized each individual as eligible for having speech and language therapy or not being eligible.  This is important because then you can better see who needs the language therapy that the facility can provide for them.  Helping them in the future of feeling more confident and lowering the opportunity of them making the mistake of reoffending again.

Yes, you can give them the opportunity to work but they are going to need to be able to succeed in their new career, to prove that they can work hard and better themselves.  If they do not take the time to work on their speech impairments then they are going to always have the struggle of either that being the reason they do not get employed or if they do get hired the reason they probably wont keep their job.  If you are going to be setting them up to be able to work, they are going to need to be able to fully communicate by themselves.  We want to teach them to be independent so that they can fend for themselves and work harder as an individual.  Considering their background as having committed a felony, they will probably start towards the bottom of the company and with helping them improve their speech impairment we can help them climb the corporate ladder and create a more successful future for them.

There is however, still the hiring part of this whole situation.  Hughes said “the tick box excludes applicants at the very first part of the recruitment process as a previous criminal conviction was often seen as "shorthand" for bad employee.  "We need to change the perception," she said. "We need to say that, actually, one in five adults in the UK has a criminal conviction more serious than a driving offence. So get real: you're already employing people with criminal convictions whether you want to admit it or not.’”  The fact that businesses are already hiring people who have committed felonies yet we are shutting out teens that have this same background needs to change.

When you look at it, you want these teens to have a better chance.  Anyone with a heart would understand that every child needs a chance.  These teens are the next generation, the next in line to work in our stores, to run our businesses and to help mold the next generation.  If we don’t give them a fighting chance then we are setting the future up for failure.  From multiple people you will hear the constant reply that we can fix the problem before it ever happens.  We could strengthen the communication help in our school programs to prevent their language disability from holding them back but we need to realize is it’s the child’s decision.  In the end they chose to except the help or to fall behind with their disability.  So no matter how much we strengthen the educational department we are still going to be dealing with this problem.  So we should focus on strengthening all places that the teen or child can find help.

The second article mentions how we need to fix the Tick Box in Juvenile Centers so that more teens have opportunities to get job interviews even though they have committed a felony.  Edwina Hughes, campaign manager at Business in the Community, urges “..Companies to drop the tick box that demands applicants disclose criminal convictions in recruitment forms, said the campaign would "ensure people are assessed on their skills and abilities first, rather than their convictions".” Bailey insists that if you look at the person and see who they are rather then a piece of paper that states what they’ve done wrong, you can see them for who they truly are giving more teens a chance to work and create a better future for themselves.  It’s hard because we live in a world that would be very hard to trust, and the constant worry for how the employee would represent you and your company.  But even the smallest job and opportunity for them to work is giving them a fighting chance in this world.  I know that a local grocery store in my hometown takes the time to hire individuals who have speech and language disabilities to work in the day at a less busy time.  Even though they are smaller jobs around the store they still give these individuals a chance to work for themselves probably giving them a sense of accomplishment.  This is contradicting though, because we want to also help them improve their disability so that they can improve from where they are rather than accepting that they will always have this speech and language disability.

            I very much agree with what Bailey has to say to some extent.  On one hand I think that giving them a hard working job is going to better them and help them in so many aspects but on the other hand I don’t know how I would feel if my co worker has committed a felony or multiple felony’s considering the person.  It is hard though because it is all very depending on the individual and the situation.  Considering where I work at a bank, the hiring process is more difficult seeing as the bank is trusting you with their customers’ personal information and dealing with the banks money.  But I do, however, agree that there are jobs out there that are better suiting.  I think that through working their hardest to prove that they can be trusted that they can be hired and become successful like those who do not have a speech disability or felony in their past.  In all the two articles help to show the background and history of the story for young offenders.  Both Bailey, Gregory and Bryan help to show us that you really cant judge a book by its cover.

Work Cited

Bailey, Adrian. "Give Young Offenders Speech and Language Therapy." The

Guardian. N.p., 2014. Web.

Gregory, Juliette, and Karen Bryan. "Speech and Therapy Intervention."

International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders. N.p., Mar.

Rough Draft Synthesis Paper

Kourtney Kramer

English 2010

Writing Proposal

How to Better Young Offenders and Their Future

Can we trust the young offenders of today to work for our companies, and our business’?  A recent article by Adrian Bailey, talks about how in order to help reduce the number of young offenders of reoffending, we need to give them the opportunity to work.  He states that if we strengthen their speech and language therapy that we can help better them to be hard workers, and to be more determined.

We would start by looking at who was at risk of becoming an offender because of the way they were raised, who they were and the kind of environment they were raised in. In my very first article they preformed studies on each individual in a juvenile center and tested him or her to see where their education level was at, to reinstate their suspicion about speech and language troubles being the cause of teens that become young offenders.  To better categorize each of them and to also see if they were eligible to be in a working environment they categorized each individual as eligible for having speech and language therapy or not being eligible.  This is important because then you can better see who needs the language therapy that the facility can provide for them.  Helping them in the future of feeling more confident and lowering the opportunity of them making the mistake of reoffending again.

Yes, you can give them the opportunity to work but they are going to need to be able to succeed in their new career, to prove that they can work hard and better themselves.  If they do not take the time to work on their speech impairments then they are going to always have the struggle of either that being the reason they do not get employed or if they do get hired the reason they probably wont keep their job.  If you are going to be setting them up to be able to work, they are going to need to be able to fully communicate by themselves.  We want to teach them to be independent so that they can fend for themselves and work harder as an individual.  Considering their background as having committed a felony, they will probably start towards the bottom of the company and with helping them improve their speech impairment we can help them climb the corporate ladder and create a more successful future for them.

There is however, still the hiring part of this whole situation.  Hughes said the tick box excludes applicants at the very first part of the recruitment process as a previous criminal conviction was often seen as "shorthand" for bad employee.  "We need to change the perception," she said. "We need to say that, actually, one in five adults in the UK has a criminal conviction more serious than a driving offence. So get real: you're already employing people with criminal convictions whether you want to admit it or not."  The fact that businesses are already hiring people who have committed felonies yet we are shutting out teens that have this same background needs to change.

When you look at it, you want these teens to have a better chance.  Anyone with a heart would understand that every child needs a chance.  These teens are the next generation, the next in line to work in our stores, to run our businesses and to help mold the next generation.  If we don’t give them a fighting chance then we are setting the future up for failure.  From multiple people you will hear the constant reply that we can fix the problem before it ever happens.  We could strengthen the communication help in our school programs to prevent their language disability from holding them back but we need to realize is it’s the child’s decision.  In the end they chose to except the help or to fall behind with their disability.  So no matter how much we strengthen the educational department we are still going to be dealing with this problem.  So we should focus on strengthening all places that the teen or child can find help.

The second article mentions how we need to fix the Tick Box in Juvenile Centers so that more teens have opportunities to get job interviews even though they have committed a felony.  Edwina Hughes, campaign manager at Business in the Community, which will next month launch the "ban the box" campaign urging companies to drop the tick box that demands applicants disclose criminal convictions in recruitment forms, said the campaign would "ensure people are assessed on their skills and abilities first, rather than their convictions".  The author insists that if you look at the person and see who they are rather then a piece of paper that states what they’ve done wrong, you can see them for who they truly are giving more teens a chance to work and create a better future for themselves.  It’s hard because we live in a world that would be very hard to trust, and the constant worry for how the employee would represent you and your company.  But even the smallest job and opportunity for them to work is giving them a fighting chance in this world.  I know that a local grocery store in my hometown takes the time to hire individuals who have speech and language disabilities to work in the day at a less busy time.  Even though they are smaller jobs around the store they still give these individuals a chance to work for themselves probably giving them a sense of accomplishment.  This is contradicting though, because we want to also help them improve their disability so that they can improve from where they are rather than accepting that they will always have this speech and language disability.

            I very much agree with what this article has to say to some extent.  On one hand I think that giving them a hard working job is going to better them and help them in so many aspects but on the other hand I don’t know how I would feel if my co worker has committed a felony or multiple felony’s considering the person.  It is hard though because it is all very depending on the individual and the situation.  Considering where I work at a bank, the hiring process is more difficult seeing as the bank is trusting you with their customers’ personal information and dealing with the banks money.  But I do, however, agree that there are jobs out there that are better suiting.  I think that through working their hardest to prove that they can be trusted that they can be hired and become successful like those who do not have a speech disability or felony in their past.

Writing Proposal for Synthesis Paper

Kourtney Kramer

English 2010

Writing Proposal

            When writing my first paper I came across a very huge problem, I was did not agree with my article the entire time.  Which caused me to end up writing the wrong kind of paper at first.  What I hope to properly write about this time is the way the two articles go hand in hand and the ways that they seem to disregard each other.

            The second article I chose talks about introducing speech and language therapy for young offenders and how it would reduce re-offending and help them into employment on release. 

            My very first article had its main focus on how to better narrow down who was at risk of becoming an offender because of the way they were raised, who they were and the kind of environment they were in.  They studied each individual in a juvenile center and tested him or her to see where their education level was at, to reinstate their suspicion about speech and language troubles being the cause of teens that become young offenders.

            How my two articles connect is, when you look at it, you want these teens to have a better chance.  Anyone with a heart would understand that every child needs a chance.  These teens are the next generation, the next in line to work in our stores, to run our buisness’ and to help mold the next generation.  If we don’t give them a fighting chance then we are setting the future up for failure.  The second article is all about how we need to fix the Tick Box in Juvenile Centers so that more teens have opportunities to get job interviews even though they have committed a felony.  They author insists that if you look at the person and see who they are rather then a piece of paper that states what they’ve done wrong, you can see them for who they truly are giving more teens a chance to work and create a better future for themselves.

            I very much agree with what this article has to say to some extent.  On one hand I think that giving them a hard working job is going to better them and help them in so many aspects but on the other hand I don’t know how I would feel if my co worker has committed a felony or multiple felony’s considering the person. 

Final Draft

Kourtney Kramer

English 1050

Rough Draft

Speech Therapy for Young Offenders

What if someone told you, that because of the way your child spoke, made him or her a factor of becoming a young offender with multiple charges?  The fact that they may have had a small stutter or some kind of speech impediment makes them at risk for making bad decisions in the prime teens of their life.  The article that I chose for my analysis paper talks about the testing they have done to determine if young offenders were those with past speech issues.  They stated that around 50% of children and adolescents receiving services for a range of adjustment disorders (for example, behavior disturbances, anxiety disorders) actually display language impairments when specifically tested.

I do not think that the author did everything they could do to capture its readers. The first few pages are successful on teaching you about the situation to which young children with speech impediments are determined to grow up like.  The author is more about logos and the facts of the situation.  Logos is very much the spot where the tests are passed back and forth to only show the facts.  This is ineffective because there is nothing to tie the reader in.  It is hard to read a paper if the author does not know how successfully pull in their readers and to keep them interested.

The article is although, effective in showing its readers that there is hope for those young offenders who are being held and still are continuing to suffer from speech or language disabilities.  It reminds us that the hat unmet developmental difficulties can be addressed in order to maximize their opportunities for gainful participation in society and to avert the adoption of an ongoing adult ‘lifestyle’ associated with persistent crime.

As far as statistics go, the article was very good at showing you many examples but how am I supposed to understand if I don’t know the content in the article?  When I look at this article I think of someone printing off a bunch of numbers that have no meaning to them.  My biggest question was whether or not the author was trying to help solve the problem or to simply show to more people who aren’t aware that there is this lurking problem of children with speech impediments and not living up to their full potential in life.

It is also effective in showing you that the way kids are treated at a young age does have a very large impact on the choices they make through out their lives.  The more confident students go on to be successful and the less confidant students get held back at a disadvantage.  This in turn reduces the likelihood of school engagement, thus lessening the access that high- risk young people have to the protective effects of academic achievement. Beitchman et al. (1999) suggest that communication difficulties tend to be misinterpreted as non-compliance and conduct problems in the classroom environment.

            This article is trying to show that speech and language therapy intervention can be effectively given to youth by teams who can test each individual.  They preform multiple tests to rate where each individual is at on an educational level. They aim towards identifying any language and communication difficulties in the young people, to coordinate with their personal needs, and to evaluate any change in language or communication post-intervention.

            A decision was made to target the young people on the ISSP.  The ISSP is the most rigorous non-custodial intervention available for young offenders.  It targets the most active repeat young offenders and those who commit the most serious crimes.  They ISSP program aims to reduce the frequency and seriousness of offending in the target groups they are testing and to tackle the underlying needs of offenders which give rise to offending, with particular emphasis on education and training. To meet the criteria for ISSP, the young people will either be prolific offenders who have committed at least ten crimes over the past year and who have already received other community sentences through the English courts, or they will have committed a crime that, if committed by an adult, would have carried a custodial sentence

of 10 years or more.

Teens who usually engage in criminal activity, in the author’s point of view, are linked to having speech disabilities as well as learning difficulties.  They say that the tie between these two is they are functioning two years below their peer group putting them in a disadvantage of those around them.  The idea of them being left behind creates the opportunity for anger and frustration to build up and put them in the position to be a young offender. Studies of offenders’ speaking and listening skills have used populations of young people in different countries over various age ranges. This means that studies are not directly compatible, but a consensus figure of 50–60% of young people who are involved in offending having speech, language and communication needs is emerging. 

             In my opinion, if we work hard to help improve children’s speech disabilities while they are still young, rather than waiting until it weighs in on their lives and starts having an effect on their social life, we can help better them.  A lot of the solutions to these problems are simple, yet we are not giving them all the effort we can give.  If each person realized the impact they had on a child’s social behaviors then we could all do our part in helping them have a fighting chance.  The article suggests the strengthening of the educational support and I personally think that this is the best solution.  Over all the impact that this article has is pretty important, the author is very creditable and trusting because of the educational level you can detect through the words and test they preform.