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March 23, 2009

Criminal justice faculty present at national conference

University of Louisiana at Monroe faculty members Attapol Kuanliang, Ph.D.; Kelly Wright and Robert Hanser, Ph.D., co-presented a paper at the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences 2009 Annual Conference, held in Boston, Mass., in mid-March.

Their presentation demonstrated some of the benefits and challenges involved with multi-agency partnerships when conducting community-based research.

Wright is a ULM alum who received her master’s in criminal justice in 2005. She is currently the coordinator of the Family Preservation Program at The Center for Children and Families, Family Foundations Program in Rayville. In working with troubled youth and their families, she has found many of the criminological theories from her prior graduate studies to be of particular relevance to the issues she encounters in her agency.

Kuanliang, assistant professor in the ULM Department of Criminal Justice, has expertise in juvenile justice issues, evaluative research and criminological theory. He is in the preliminary stages of design development as a future evaluator of the Family Foundations Program.

Kuanliang and Hanser conduct various forms of evaluative research for outlying agencies in the local region. In many cases, their research tests the application of a variety of criminological theories used to explain the etiology of crime and the workings of the criminal mind.

More about the Family Foundations Program:

The Family Foundations Program began in 2005 and is an innovative and goal-oriented treatment program that provides services to others in need besides delinquents and status offenders who are diverted from the juvenile justice system, with the hope that such diversion practices will reduce youth from maturing into future hardened criminals.

The program serves youth and their parents throughout a six-parish region in northeast Louisiana. Family Foundations is a pragmatic family preservation program that specifically targets those factors that contribute to a youngster’s delinquent behavior. The primary goal of this program is to prevent out-of-home placement of these youth.

Family Foundations interventions primarily aim to improve caregiver discipline practices, enhance family affective relations, decrease youth association with deviant peers, increase youth association with pro-social peers, improve the school and/or vocational performance of youngsters, engage youth in pro-social recreational outlets, and develop an indigenous support network of extended family, neighbors and friends to help caregivers achieve and maintain effective parenting and modeling for their children.

To learn more, visit www.cfcfnela.org.

The ULM Department of Criminal Justice has been actively involved with The Center for Children and Families for over a year. It strongly supports area agencies as well as provides assistance to the local community in its effort to prevent juvenile delinquency.

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