Issue – Academic Failure and Juvenile Crime

Senator Norman Sakamoto
August 2, 2006

The State Attorney General office released a report1in which it was found that academic failure was the most significant predictor of long-term incarceration at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility, having the highest odds of 8.42 to 1.2

http://hawaii.gov/ag/cpja/main/rs/sp_reports_0306/sjoh.pdf

The report's statistical analysis confirms what many of us knew anecdotally: that failing in school causes many youths to become involved in serious criminal activity. We need to continue to give our schools our enthusiastic support, press on with educational reform, and work to extinguish the repair and maintenance backlog. Hawaii's future depends on our children succeeding in our public schools. Academic failure carries too high a price tag for our state to afford.

1 The Serious Juvenile Offender in Hawaii: A Statistical Profile (June 2006), prepared by Lisa J. Pasko, Research and Statistics Branch, Crime Prevention and Justice Assitance Division, Department of the Attorney General.

2 Table 6: Significant Predictors of HYCF Commitment, page 11.