Conduct Disorder
Denise Crane
January 10, 2011
CJ 439
Unit 3
Conduct Disorder is diagnosed as a behavior disorder; the child or adolescent usually become aggressive towards others or even to animals. They may often be found destroying property as well, such as setting fire to a building or vandalizing public property. Some children or adolescent may start to lie, steal, and commit other delinquency crimes. They may also start to violate status offense rules as well. The children that are diagnosed with conduct disorder should have a very big affect when mitigation the disposition of the juvenile cases. This should be based on the fact that conduct disorder is found to be impairment in the frontal love of the brain that will interfere with their ability to plan, harm and learn from negative experiences. (Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, 2010) Based on this fact that it interferes with their ability to learn from negative experiences shows that whether the juvenile is incarcerated or not, they will not learn anything from the punishment. Therefore, they should be handled through behavior therapy.
Behavioral therapy works with the children or adolescent to help them acknowledge what good behavior and bad behavior is. What the therapy does is for every good behavior committed during the week, the child or teenager should get a reward. The therapists are trying to re-teach or “un-learn” the inappropriate behaviors. The parents must be fully 100% involved with this therapy because they are the ones that have to enforce it every day in order for it to be successful. The parents are to work together and keep all rewards and punishments consistent. Here the parents learn to control their child’s behavior based on giving appraise and rewards. As the child gets better at their behavior, the rewards should become further apart to weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, and so on forth. (Andrea Borkoukis, 2008)
Behavior therapy is used to treat...