Wilderness Programs

Historical Background

Wilderness programs as a treatment strategy for delinquent youth have roots in several early interventions. First, California developed forestry camps in the 1930s to provide work and housing for delinquent boys. The crews performed conservation work, park development, and road construction. Counseling, education, and religious activities were also included in the schedules. The second source was Kurt Hahn, a German educator and pioneer in experimental education, who founded the Salem School in Germany during the 1920s. The school was based on learning by doing. Hahn believed that modern youth suffered from the “misery of unimportance.” He saw the Western world as information rich and experience poor. Adolescents in Hahn's view were not initiated into adulthood through increasing levels of responsibility. Rather, they were given no significant duties and received a level of recognition only barely greater than that of young children.

Programs developed from Hahn's premises attempted to elicit prosocial values through a series of challenging experiences. On the basis of this philosophy, an Outward Bound model was first used by the Welsh to train their merchant seamen to survive in lifeboats on the open sea. Their curriculum focused on group pride, teamwork, trust, and self-discipline.

The wilderness concept was brought to the United States in the 1960s as programs for youth. It was applied to various adolescent groups and, naturally, found its way to programs for adjudicated youth. However, this model has also been adopted by American businesses. Trips into the mountains and deep woods are often used to expose executives and managers to the benefits of building teams and solving unusual problems. Although the problems may seem totally unrelated to the office, in reality, these highly structured retreats often have implications for creative thinking, innovative management, and enhanced personnel relations.

Wilderness Programming for Juveniles Today

Wilderness or challenge programs for juveniles are usually designed in two phases. The first phase is to complete successfully a series of strenuous physical and mental challenges that the youths are unlikely to have experienced. The expectation is that achievement in these tasks, in both group and individual exercises, will build self-esteem and confidence. This is then applied to tasks in the second phase, where the goal is to have the young people master tasks in their own lives, families, schools, and neighborhoods using the same decision-making and problem-solving skills they learned in the programs.

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