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Juvenile Delinquency and Deterrents
Explain how the threat of punishment does or does not deter juvenile delinquency.
Punishment of juvenile delinquents has been a hot button issue in many jurisdictions because of the need to prosecute crime but also the desire to shield young people from harm. Usually when a young person commits a crime, he or she is sentenced to detention in either a juvenile facility or perhaps even an adult prison facility for a length of time appropriate to their crime. General deterrence is a theory that states that the fear of punishment will be enough to prevent crime. For those that are not deterred by the thought of punishment, there is always detention. According to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, nearly 70% of juvenile delinquency cases will end in a juvenile court (Shoemaker 2009,-page 39). This means...
In older days, juvenile crimes were often dismissed and the perpetrator let off with a slap on the wrist. This often led to the commission of more crimes rather than the perpetrator going straight. Many states are now taking an opposite stance on this, since it has been proven that crimes that go unpunished will not lead to a reformed criminal (Greenwood 2011,-page 99). The fear of prison time will often lead young people to avoid criminal behaviors, particularly if they have already had some time behind bars, an idea known as specific deterrence. According to Randi Hjalmarsson (2009), increasing the amount of time that juveniles spend in prison is not encouraging them to reform, but rather having an inverted affect that they are leaving prison less empathetic to their fellow men and…
The National Guard Youth Foundation is an organization which helps disadvantaged youth (National 2013). According to the social structure theory, young people who are financially disadvantaged will be more likely to commit crimes and to get into legal trouble. Many people in financially disadvantaged communities feel that they cannot overcome this difference and so turn to trouble out of anger and frustration as much as necessity. This program takes kids, most of whom have already been in some manner of legal difficulties and uses military knowledge to provide the young people with discipline and determination. They also encourage involvement in the military and in pursuing a college education.
b. Social Process Theories
Social process theories postulate that communication with peers can have either positive or negative effects on a young person. Youths who interact with dangerous people who are interested in criminal behaviors will be more likely to commit crimes themselves. Research indicates that sports teams are an ideal way to keep young people out of trouble (DeLeon 2012). School-sponsored sports programs ensure that teens are with people in similar circumstances. They have to keep their
If integration with a conventional social group helps prevent suicide and "delinquency" (Hirschi 1969) and motivates people to fight, make sacrifices for a community, or commit deviant acts on behalf of a sub-cultural group, it should affect almost all forms of deviance. The absence of social integration with conventional groups should be influential in psychotic behavior (unless that specific behavior is organically determined and totally uncontrollable); without integration into
United States has the highest rate of confinement of prisoners per 100,000 population than any other Western country. Analyze this phenomena and discuss actions that you feel are necessary to combat this problem. The United States currently has the highest incarceration rate of any nation worldwide. For example, greater than 60% of nations have incarceration rates below 150 per 100,000 people (Walmsley, 2003). The United States makes up just about
4). This idea has since been abandoned. The mythology of the Amazons, a matriarchy of warrior women, has been discounted as no more than a myth, one deriving from the deep-seated fear on the part of males that they might lose their power and authority. In matrilineal societies, men tend still to monopolize the rights of power. Some Chinese anthropologists believe the stories of true matriarchal societies in some
role of prisons in the society. I have included the theories of deterrence, rehabilitation, retribution, incapacitation, non-interventionism and restoration to support my discussion along with their positive and negative aspects. In the conclusion, I have given my preferred theory of imprisonment as the most effective and important ones. A prison can be defined as a protected and locked institution where juvenile and grown-up offenders are housed with punishments that vary
George Knox, director of the National Gang Crime Research Center, teaches law enforcement officers how to search WebPages to pick up on gang member's lingo, territories, and rivalries. He also asserts it is crucial for officers to learn how to "read between the lines" when searching gang members' WebPages. Time on the Web, similar to time on the streets, gives gang investigators the ability to read the hieroglyphics of wall
Gun Violence In December of 2012, Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT became just the most recent name to be added to the list of schools now infamous for the terrible tragedies to occur within. While it may on one level be anecdotal rather than statistical in nature, the school shooting that claimed the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Sandy Hook seems to represent a trend of