Narconon New Life and the Juvenile Court in Utah

Narconon Utah New Life Juvenile Center, servicing juvenile offenders on misdemeanor probation, opened in Provo, Utah in 1998. At its inception, it serviced juveniles on a state-supervised, non-residential basis, daily after school. Court ordered to the rehabilitation program, with mandatory parent participation, youths 13 to 17 do all the steps of the Narconon program.
Special address is given to the students' study problems, in that they arrive with sub-literate or virtually illiterate skills. It has been definitely found that their schooling difficulties are not based on inherent disabilities, but on the effect of drug residuals on their thinking and lack of study tools. Once trained and drilled in the use of effective study skills, their learning rates soar.

Additionally, the communication skills segment of the program has been found to be profoundly important. Youth on drugs are completely "out-of-communication" with the world around them. Their destructive and anti-social behavior is based on being factually unable to understand others or to be understood. Therefore, their communication skills are directly addressed immediately upon starting the program, with drills of gradiently increasing difficulty and skill. The gains from this program step alone are considered remarkable by the Probation Officers working alongside Narconon staff. But the truth is these gains regarding communication skill are the bedrock upon which the rest of the program stands.

Young students who can communicate with you do not need to strike you or to run away.

Finally, other than the extraordinary changes that accompany completion of the body detoxification program, considerable stress is laid on developing a workable and self-determined system of ethics and morals for these youth. They begin the program unable to distinguish between friend and foe, in fact seeing them in reverse, but slowly they regain if not evolve for the first time a personal sense of right and wrong. This new and strong morality and personal integrity is what must sustain them after program completion. Adult students of the Narconon program must go through the same evolution or redevelopment of a sense of morality, but the problem with youth is that they often do not have an earlier experiential record to which they can compare a drug-free life. All too often, what they knew as young adults or teenage youth was the chaos and jungle rules of drug abuse. It is here that Mr. Hubbard's instructional methodology for consulting the actual understanding of a young student, in gradient steps, comes to the fore and makes the difference.

The Narconon model NewLife juvenile rehabilitation program has generated interest from juvenile court judges and administrators worldwide. Their interest is based partly also on the unique close working relationship between the judges, the probation officers, and the NewLife personnel. The probation officers themselves do the steps of the program so that they have personal knowledge and understanding of what the youth under their supervision are doing. The Narconon students under the jurisdiction of "State Supervision" must abide by very stringent regulatory control of their movements and activity during the program.

Thereby the Utah juvenile court system, through providing this intermediary measure of intensive probationary "state supervision", allows for these youth to do the Narconon program while still living at home instead of being taken away from their family and institutionalized in a juvenile hall or other detention center. This reinforces the structure and values of the family rather than replacing them with the strictures of public justice. Students who fail at this intermediary measure may still be incarcerated, but fortunately the great majority of the Utah Narconon NewLife program's young graduates are living stably drug-free and ethical lives. Most students post a radical improvement in schoolwork as well.