Theatre-in-Diversion: Evaluating an Arts-Based Approach to Combating Juvenile Delinquency

Can theatre change lives? This is a question that arts educators struggle to answer in an era of declining funding and increasing emphasis on data-driven assessment. The Theatre-in-Diversion program at Western Kentucky University (WKU) was created to use theatre structures to engage at-risk teenagers while simultaneously incorporating a research component to assess the impacts of this type of intervention. After three years of running the program and collecting data,¹ we have found qualitative evidence that this type of programming does have positive effects on youth participants.

Theatre-in-Diversion is part of a larger national movement to find alternative methods for addressing juvenile crime. Diversion programs began in the 1970s as an effort to handle youths who commit status offenses outside of the traditional criminal justice system.² Status offenses are acts that would be legal for adults but are considered illegal for juveniles due to their youthful status in society. Examples of status offenses include truancy, underage drinking, violating curfew, and certain types of sexual acts. The Court Designated Worker Program began in 1986 through an act of the Kentucky General Assembly in order to provide statewide, coordinated, diversion-related services to the youth of the Commonwealth.

When a juvenile commits a status offense, or is taken into custody by or reported to law enforcement related to a public offense, that case is handled by a Court Designated Worker (CDW). If the youth qualifies for a diversion, the CDW is responsible for monitoring the youth and developing a diversion agreement whereby the youth is responsible for engaging in a pro-social community project and/or the completion of volunteer work within the community. Each diversion agreement must include elements of prevention, education, accountability, and treatment, if appropriate. After the youth fulfills the requirements of the diversion agreement, his/her charges are dismissed and do not become a part of the formal court record.

A review of the scholarly literature will reveal few published works discussing the implementation or evaluation of theatre-based diversion programs in the United States and in other countries. Searches for the keywords “theatre,” “diversion,” and “delinquency” in Google Scholar, JSTOR, ABI/Inform Global (formerly Proquest), and EBSCOHost Databases (Search Complete and Academic Search Premier) provide only a handful of scholarly works on the topic. One of the articles focuses on the implementation of a theatre-in-diversion program in Kenton County, Kentucky, in partnership with Northern Kentucky University (NKU). Another publication discusses a second program, modeled on the NKU plan, at Santa Fe Community College and New Mexico State University. A final article concerns a program in Great Britain. In each of these articles, the authors discuss the steps in implementing the programs and some of their early successes.³

According to an e-mailed conversation with Charles Lindsey, a program coordinator for Family and Juvenile Services in Kentucky, the program at NKU and other similar efforts in the state were envisioned as a partnership between state colleges and universities and local court systems, designed to offer teenagers the option of attending a seven- to twelve-week series of theatre workshops on a college campus in lieu of other forms of punishment or intervention.⁴ These programs were the model for the Western Kentucky University course. However, the WKU program incorporates an element not currently found in the other diversion programs, namely, a built-in partnership with the Western Kentucky University sociology department.

We designed the Western Kentucky program both to provide a positive service for local young people as well as to evaluate the effectiveness of such opportunities in general. During each session, Professor Jordan works with four to ten WKU theatre students to develop and implement the dramatic elements of the course, while Dr. Daday works with two to four criminology students to determine the class’s short-term and long-term impacts on the participants. While some arts-based diversion programs are run entirely by adult facilitators, the Western Kentucky program is primarily student led. Students oversee the teaching and research components of the program...