Achievement Place: experiments in self-government with pre-delinquents.
Let the clients run their own court and they will speak up more than when adults hold the gavel.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Macdonald et al. (1973) moved ten pre-delinquent boys into a house called Achievement Place. The boys made their own rules and held trials when rules were broken. Peers, not adults, called the trials and gave or took away points.
The researchers flipped who held power. In one phase, peers ran the show. In another, adults did. They counted how many boys spoke up during rule talks and how many reports they filed.
What they found
When peers ran the trials, almost every boy joined the talk. When adults ran them, half the boys stayed quiet.
Adding point rewards for reports made more boys file, but most reports became short and silly.
How this fits with other research
Neef et al. (1986) saw the same boost with disruptive elementary kids. When the teacher made a boy the recess monitor, his own negative behavior dropped sharply. Peer power works across ages.
Hursh et al. (1974) tried the opposite. They trained elementary peer managers, then paid the whole group when work was done. The managers soon slacked. L et al. shows why: keep the peer in charge, not the group purse.
Cissne et al. (2026) moved the idea forward. In a modern juvenile facility, staff earned rewards for writing praise notes. Resident problem behavior fell. The 1973 youth court planted the seed; 2026 shows staff can play too.
Why it matters
If you run a group home or classroom, let the clients hold the gavel. Rotate who leads the meeting or judges the infraction. Keep adult voice low and peer voice loud. Skip points for paperwork; they cheapen the product. Instead, praise the process out loud. You should see more voices, smoother days, and fewer write-ups.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
One of the goals of many treatment programs for pre-delinquent youths is the development of the skills involved in the democratic decision-making process. At Achievement Place, one aspect of the treatment program is a semi-self-government system whereby the seven pre-delinquent youths can democratically establish many of their own rules of behavior, monitor their peers' behavior to detect violations of their rules, and conduct a "trial" to determine a rule violator's guilt or innocence, and to determine the consequences for a youth who violates a rule. Two experiments were carried out to determine the role of some of the procedures in the boys' participation in the self-government system. Experiment I showed that more boys participated in the discussion of consequences for a rule violation when they had complete responsibility for setting the consequence during the trials than when the teaching-parents set the consequence for each rule violation before the trial. An analysis of the rule violations in this experiment indicated that the boys in Achievement Place reported more of the rule violations that resulted in trials than reported by the teaching-parents or school personnel. The boys reported rule violations that occurred in the community and school as well as at Achievement Place, including most of the serious rule violations that came to the attention of the teaching-parents. In Experiment II, the results indicated that more trials were called when the teaching-parents were responsible for calling trials on rule violations reported by the peers than when the boys were responsible for calling trials. When the youths earned points for calling trials the average number of trials per day increased, but more trivial rule violations were reported. These results suggest that aspects of the democratic decision-making process in a small group of pre-delinquents can be studied and variables that affect participation can be identified and evaluated.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1973 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1973.6-31