Kids For Cash: Hostile Forces ProfitFrom Juvenile Justice Programs Designed To Fail (pictures and video)

by Monica Davis

The Boomer generation is peaking and soon the nation will have more than 100 million children. Given the atrocities in the juvenile justice and child welfare agencies, what does this mean for todays kids and the ones who will be boern in the next 25 years?

As governments retrench du to less funds, what kind of social welfare agencies and institutions will be able to deal with the upcoming explosion in the under 20 year demographic?

The number of children is projected to increase by a third to reach 106.1 million by  2050, down from 36 percent of the population, when the baby boom peaked in 1964. What will this mean when the definition of families will have changed as the nuclear and extended families becomes extinct?

In 2011, there were 73.9 million children in the United States, 1.5 million more than in 2000. This number is projected to increase to 101.6 million by 2050. In 2011, there weresimilar numbers of children in each of the following three age groups: 0–5 years (24.3 million), 6–11 years (24.6 million), and 12–17 years (25.1 million).In 2011, children made up 24 percent of the population, down from a peak of 36 percent atthe end of the “baby boom” (1964). Children are projected to remain a fairly stable percentageof the total population through 2050, when they are projected to compose 23 percent of thepopulation.  MOREHERE

Here’s the stark reality. We have spent incalculable dollars on well-intentioned projects to curb juvenile violence. But we can’t say what works best. We simply don’t know.

It’s not from failing to try. Countless government and nongovernmental agencies, corporations, foundations and churches have generated big ideas and dollars to help at-risk youth escape futile futures.

And our best chance for success comes from reaching and helping at-risk youth in their early teens — and preventing them from shapeshifting into criminal delinquents in just a few years. For the most part, however, past projects simply didn’t deploy essential and rigorous assessments and measurement to prove they worked.

That’s not surprising. Rough calculations by some domestic policy experts indicate that less than $1 of every $100 of government spending is backed by even the most basic proof that money is spent wisely. Also disquieting is that when an at-risk youth participates in a program that fails instead of succeeds, it denotes a human cost. MOREHERE.