INFLUENCE OF COMMUNITY-BASED SUPERVISION PROGRAMMES ON CHILD OFFENDERS' TRANSFORMATION IN KAKAMEGA COUNTY, KENYA.

Community based supervision programmes offer rehabilitative options to traditional justice procedures by placing focus on transformation as opposed to punishment to child offenders. This paper has discussed how the community-based programmes have changed the child offenders in Kakamega County in Kenya. The researcher used a descriptive survey design and a sample population of 225 respondents who comprised of child offenders, community, and justice system stakeholders. The questions were done using questionnaires and interviews and analyzed using descriptive statistics, logistic regression, and thematic analysis. The research concentrated on five major community-based supervision interventions, namely, therapeutic psychosocial counselling, education, host family placement, vocational training, and victim-offender mediation. The results showed that the positive change of child offenders was statistically significantly influenced by all the five programmes (p < 0.05). There was the strongest influence by therapeutic psychosocial counselling (odds ratio = 5.92), then education (odds ratio = 4.75), placement in host families (3.46), vocational training (2.43), and victim-offender mediation (2.10). The majority of the respondents recognized the significance of host families (90.4%), vocational training (90.2%), and education (85.6%) in encouraging social reintegration and development of skills. Nonetheless, 82.6% of the respondents reported challenges of stigma, scarcity of resources, and problems with adaptation. The researchers conclude that community-based supervision programmes are very useful in transforming the behaviour and social reintegration of child criminals. It suggests that these programmes need to be integrated by adding and enhancing the diversion mechanisms, to enhance the reach and sustainability of such programmes