Deviant Behavior in the United States, There

Deviant Behavior In the United States, there are laws which determine the proper punishment for individuals who choose to commit crimes. If someone is under a certain age, then that individual is held less responsible for their choices than an adult who makes that same choice. However, if the crime is severe enough or if there is no appropriate remorse from the perpetrator, District Attorneys and prosecution may decide to try that person as an adult, even though they are under the age of eighteen.

Theoreticians have argued about teenagers since the first stirrings of the psychoanalytic movement at the time of Freud. Can someone who is not yet a physical adult still make adult decisions and thus should their punishment fit their age or their action? Deviant behavior can manifest itself in three ways: power, money, and crime. Deviance in teenagers can be seen in all three categories. In Marjie Lundstrom's article "Kids are Kids -- Until They Commit Crimes," the author discusses several cases wherein teenagers were tried as adults.

One boy in Yuba City, CA robbed a bank after something he witnessed on television. Aged fifteen when he committed the crime, he will likely be in his 40s whence he is released. An even younger boy, fourteen-year-old Thomas Preciado, was tried as an adult when stabbed a minimart clerk to death. She uses precedent and similarity of conditions to illustrate her point. CNN reported a case where a nine-year-old was tried as an adult in the shooting case of his seven-year-old neighbor (Schwartz).

In Pennsylvania, there is no low age limit determining who can be tried as an adult. Because the child lied about his actions afterwards, prosecutors claimed this showed adult thinking. Author Paul Thompson's article is more concerned with the actual science of the human brain than with appeal to emotion. Teenagers, he argues, behave erratically and illogically because of biology. One such reason is that, during a person's teen years, there is "massive loss of brain tissue" (Thompson).

His research at the University of California, Los Angeles found that: Gray matter, which brain researchers believe supports all our thinking and emotions, is purged at a rate of 1% to 2% a year during the period. Stranger still, brain cells and connections are only being lost in the areas controlling impulses, risk-taking and self-control. These frontal lobes, which inhibit our violent passions, rash actions, and regulate our emotions, are vastly immature throughout the teenage years (Thompson).

Therefore, the irrationality that many people experience during their teen years and in the teen years of offspring has a scientific basis. If the misbehavior of teens is caused by biology, the question then becomes how responsible are they for their actions? Teenagers actions are limited by lack of gray matter which means they are mentally deficient during this period.

Both the articles discuss the case of Nathaniel Brazill, a boy who at age thirteen went to school and shot to death an English teacher who would not let him say goodbye to two girls on the last day of school. He, like the rest of the children discussed in the two articles, is being tried as an adult and the punishment he receives will be the same as if a fully-fledged adult had been the perpetrator.

Lundstrom's article was written when the trial of Brazill was about to start and used her knowledge of other similar cases to illustrate her belief in what would likely happen to the boy. Thompson on the other hand writes after the verdict of the Brazill case where the boy was found guilty not of the first-degree murder but of the lesser count of second-degree murder. Brazill, according to Thompson showed that he was lacking in the maturity to have made a logical decision regarding his actions.

He behaved oddly "from the act itself of Brazill's shooting a teacher he considered one of his favorites, to his subsequent inability to give a reason for doing so" (Thompson). This reminds me of an article by Robert Sampson called "Crime and Deviance over the Life Course: The Salience of Adult Social Bond." In that work, author Robert Sampson (2004), discusses his theory about how juvenile delinquents function.

He examined two boys and tested his hypothesis that antisocial behavior in childhood can be a signal that the subject will have problems in adulthood in various areas of their life, including with relation to potential criminal activity. Sampson and his associates then state that social bonds during a person's adulthood will indicate changes in their behavior, both positive and negative.

What the researchers have determined in Burgess's work through is that interaction with people and with education will be a major factor in whether or not a person pursues criminal behavior or if he or she remains law-abiding. As much as external forces can influence a person into committing crimes, Sampson also believes that external forces can influence a criminal into retirement from that lifestyle. A life is modulated by trajectory and transition.

Trajectory is the path a person is currently on and the future he or she will potentially have based on their current pattern of choices. Transitions, however, are specific events that force a person's trajectory to alter and thus, their path changes. These researchers believe that a person's potential for criminality can be predetermined based upon.