Juvenile Probation Discourse Community

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Pages: 6

Police officers have a certain persona about them; when a police officer is brought up in conversation, a fat guy eating donuts in his car, avoiding any actual work, is portrayed due to the way cinemas portray them. What about the individuals working in the jail, though— the individuals who wake up everyday and go to work hands-on with delinquents already convicted of crimes? Those individuals are directly exposed to a personal relationship with the delinquents, and that relationship takes a major toll on the officer’s outside relationships in other communities. In the research of this paper, a better understanding of the research topic— how this discourse community shaped it’s members’ identity, and engaged them, inevitably effecting their participation in other communities? — will be created. The officers are whole-heartedly engaged in the juvenile probation discourse …show more content…
When it comes to juvenile probation officers, however, their identity is created by how they interact with the juvenile delinquents: maintaining a professional conduct, which is negotiated and created by the supervising officer. One thing the officers are almost taunted with is the fact that those individual delinquents will not stay in jail forever. Whenever those individuals are released it creates a strain for officers with multiple roles in life, and a fearful mindset is sometimes engaged in the officers, creating a negative identity constraint. Due to the high rate of delinquents that work at fast food restaurants, probation officers are fearful to eat out because of the delinquent’s ability to mess with their food. They are also fearful to go out in public with their kids because they do not want the