Juvenile delinquency refers to minors who commit crimes, with the age of majority determined by law. Juvenile courts may recommend alternative rehabilitation measures instead of incarceration. Factors contributing to delinquency include genetics, upbringing, and mental illness. Prevention programs aim to avoid drug use, gang involvement, and early education. The effectiveness of prevention programs varies, but intervention and education are better than allowing delinquency to occur.
Juvenile delinquency is the broad term given to minors who commit crimes. Minors are defined as those people who have not reached adulthood or the age of majority. What defines adulthood or the age of majority in a justice system can be predetermined by law, particularly for minor offenses. Major crimes can compel courts to decide to try a minor as an adult, a very important distinction, as conviction can then mean not just spending adolescence, but a life in prison. Delinquency can be defined as the commission of those things considered to be crimes by the state, although delinquent can also mean abandoned. So juvenile delinquency can cover anything from petty crimes — a student who repeatedly cuts out of school is delinquent — to very serious crimes like theft and murder.
When a child, anyone under the age of majority, commits a crime, most often they are tried and convicted through a separate justice system from that which tries adults. There are also prison centers, in other words, prisons, specially designed for children who commit serious crimes. These are often called juvenile detention centers.
It is often up to the jurisdiction of the juvenile or family court to determine the degree of risk the child poses to society and the degree of benefit to be derived from incarceration. Juvenile court judges may have more license, especially with very young children, to find alternative means to rehabilitate a child and prevent future offending. They may recommend court-appointed therapy, house arrest, or a variety of measures other than incarceration. In many cases, the records of minors committing crimes are deleted when a minor reaches the age of eighteen, especially if no other crimes have been committed.
This has pros and cons. A minor who has committed a very serious crime may continue a pattern of criminal behavior that an adult court is unaware of by changing the nature of the sentence in an adult court. For others, having been successfully rehabilitated means they will not be discriminated against based on previous arrests, convictions, or criminal records.
There are many schools of thought on the primary factors contributing to juvenile delinquency. Many of these are related to nature/nurture topics. It is certainly true that neglected, abused or impoverished children are statistically more likely to fall into delinquency patterns. While this may be statistically significant, it does not account for the delinquency of those with good, loving parents and adequate living circumstances. More frequently, geneticists refute the idea that children are a clean slate, or blank slate.
Genetic makeup may play a role in delinquency, but may only establish a predilection for the behavior, while nurture or lack thereof may create the circumstances necessary to cause the behavior. Additionally, knowledge of early-onset mental illness helps determine appropriate rehabilitation efforts for juvenile offenders. Consideration may be given to a minor’s reasonable ability to control their behavior, based on factors such as mental illness, drug use, and upbringing. The key to determining the best rehabilitation in juvenile delinquency trials is trying to understand why a child was delinquent and what circumstances contributed to this delinquency.
In many societies, another way to address juvenile delinquency is to create programs that help prevent children from committing crimes. These programs may focus on avoiding drug use or gang involvement, or they may focus on early education, therapeutic help for families, relief for the poor, or a variety of other things. With unclear answers to a single cause of juvenile delinquency, these programs may have some success, but likely won’t reach all children who may commit a crime. Society is sometimes horrified by the seemingly random acts of relatively “normal” children that are so heinous they can’t bear to be repeated. While crime prevention is admirable, it is not universally effective. However, preventing a certain delinquency through intervention and education is better than allowing it to occur.
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