Organization brings help to juvenile offenders

Juvenile Reform Foundation (JRF) Ghana, an NGO, is leading efforts at helping to provide juveniles at the various correctional centres with technical and vocational skills to make their lives meaningful.

Mr. Geoffrey Chaucer Ofori, the Executive Director, said this was being done under its charity project, dubbed “Our Future”. Speaking at the official launch of the project in Kumasi, he announced that the training programme would commence in the coming September.

He said it was deeply troubling to see many of the young offenders come out of the correctional centres unreformed. They often tend to pick up bad habits like smoking, bullying and homosexuality. Mr. Ofori said this should not continue and that there was the need to take deliberate steps to help prevent them from going back to their bad ways after they had regained their freedom.

That demanded giving them employable skills that would enable them to become economically self-supporting. He added that those young offenders would have scant or no motivation to engage in criminal activities when they had something productive and important doing.

It was on the basis of this that his NGO was eager to support them to get back their lives. Mr. Ofori encouraged everybody not to stigmatize young offenders, who had served time at the correctional centres but to do everything to make them to feel that they were wanted by the society. They should avoid doing anything that would force them into even more serious crimes.

The Reverend Emmanuel Forson, Head Pastor of the Refreshing Pastures, urged parents to live up to their responsibility to children to stop the increasing waywardness among the youth. He applauded the NGO for the initiative and rallied public support for it.