Why do youths commit crimes

Substance abuse can be extremely dangerous for the teens. As mentioned before, substance abuse may derive from the influence of peers. The excess use of drugs can affect cognitive development of a teen, lowering his inhibitions and ability to evaluate risks. Drugs and alcohol have been regarded as powerful contributors to juvenile crime.

The use of drugs and absenteeism from school are interlinked, as one causes the other. Students who skip school are more likely to try alcohol and drugs for the first time. Absenteeism can negatively impact school grades, which can lead to poor education, low self-esteem, and low expectations for their future career development.

When teens fail at school, they shift to other risky activity, get involved in juvenile crimes and then face incarceration. Teens having negligent parents tend to become careless towards their academics, house chores, diet routine and overall physical appearance. When parents do not pay any heed towards the personal and social development of their teens, they think they have become independent and take up the most important decisions of their lives on their own.

Poor socioeconomic status can also become a contributing factor to juvenile crime, urging teens for burglary. Parents teach their children to differentiate right from wrong by giving them examples. When parents do not play their role, teens follow examples from their other family members, peers, and social groups.

When none of these concerned positive influences are present, they may suffer from moral poverty which would most likely follow teens into their adulthood. Impact of absent parents on behavior of teens. Effects of Juvenile Delinquency on Teens and their Parents. In , 40 percent of all those living below the poverty level in the United States were under the age of 18 Snyder and Sickmund, Structural changes in society, including fewer two-parent homes and more maternal employment, have contributed to a lack of resources for the supervision of children's and adolescents' free time.

Government policy on juvenile delinquency must often struggle with the appropriate balance of concern over the healthy development of children and adolescents who violate the law and a public desire to punish criminals. This tension between rehabilitation and punishment when dealing with children and adolescents who commit crimes results in an ambivalent orientation toward young offenders. Criminal acts must be suppressed, condemned, and punished.

Nevertheless, children and adolescents who commit criminal acts must be educated and supported in a growth process that should be the objective of government policy for all young people, including young offenders. A number of cognitive and social features of childhood and adolescence influence the content of juvenile crime policy. Historically, children under the age of seven have been considered below the age of reason, and therefore unable to formulate the criminal intent necessary to be held accountable for criminal offenses.

In practice, children younger than age 10 are rarely involved in the juvenile justice system. Arrests of those younger than 10 years old account for less than 2 percent of all juvenile arrests. By the age of 16 or 17, most adolescents are deemed to have sufficient cognitive capacity and life experience to be held accountable for intended wrongful acts. How to deal appropriately with those who commit crimes between the ages of 10 and 17 is the issue faced in juvenile crime policy.

Adolescence is a period of dating, driving, and expanding social networks—all choices that can produce positive or negative consequences for the adolescent and the community. Public policies in the areas of education, medical care, alcoholic beverage control, and juvenile crime reflect beliefs that adolescents have not acquired the abilities or capacities necessary for adult status.

Creating the appropriate public policy for a period of semiautonomy is no small task Zimring, To best answer the questions of how to deal with young offenders requires knowledge of factors in the individual, family, social settings, and community that influence the development of delinquent behavior; of the types of offenses committed by young people; and of the types of interventions that can most efficiently and effectively prevent offending in the first place or prevent its recurrence.

This study reviews literature in all of these areas to provide an objective view of juvenile crime and the juvenile justice system in the United States. What is often missing from discussions of juvenile crime today is recognition that children and adolescents are not just little adults, nor is the world in which they live the world of adults. Physical, emotional, and cognitive development continue throughout adolescence.

Although young people can approach decisions in a manner similar to adults under some circumstances, many decisions that children and adolescents make are under precisely the conditions that are hardest for adults—unfamiliar tasks, choices with uncertain outcomes, and ambiguous situations see, for example, Beyth-Marom and Fischhoff, ; Cohn et al.

Further complicating the matter for children and adolescents is that they often face deciding whether or not to engage in a risky behavior, such as taking drugs, shoplifting, or getting into a fight, in situations involving emotions, stress, peer pressure, and little time for reflection. Young people are liable to overestimate their own understanding of a situation, underestimate the probability of negative outcomes, and make judgments based on incorrect or incomplete information Quadrel et al.

Although adults are also prone to the same misperceptions, children's and adolescents' lack of experience increases their vulnerability. Quadrel et al. Emotions can affect decision making for both adolescents and adults. When people are experiencing positive emotions, such as excitement, happiness, love as adolescents often do when with groups of their peers , they tend to underestimate the possibility of negative consequences to their actions.

When experiencing negative emotions, such as anger, jealousy, sadness, people tend to focus on the near term and lose sight of. This is particularly relevant for adolescents, who have been found to experience wider and more rapid mood swings than adults Larson et al.

Studies of young people's understanding of legal processing and the consequences of various legal choices, such as forfeiting the right to remain silent or to have an attorney, show differences between those younger and older than about 15 years Grisso, Those under age 15 often misunderstand the concept of a right, in general, and of Miranda rights, in particular. They foresee fewer alternative courses of action in legal proceedings and tend to concentrate on short-term rather than long-term consequences Grisso, ; For example, younger youth often misconstrue the right to remain silent, believing it means they should be quiet until they are told to talk.

Nor do they completely understand the right to have an attorney present, without charge, before they talk Abramovitch et al. These misunderstandings raise concerns about children's and young adolescents' competence to stand trial in adult court. Children and adolescents from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and those with low IQs fare worse in understanding the legal process and their rights than do other children and adolescents of comparable ages Grisso, Furthermore, experience with the justice system does not ensure that young people fully understand the process, their rights, or the implications of the decisions they make.

Both Grisso and Lawrence have found that adolescent delinquents had much poorer understanding of their rights than did adult defendants. Emerging research using magnetic resonance imaging of the brain demonstrates the cognitive and emotional differences between adolescents and adults. Children and adolescents process emotionally charged information in the part of the brain responsible for instinct and gut reactions.

Children and adolescents may be physiologically less capable than adults of reasoning logically in the face of particularly strong emotions. In a recent study, Thompson et al. These new insights on brain development may have implications for holding children and adolescents criminally responsible in the same way as adults and raise concerns about initiatives to transfer younger and younger defendants to adult courts.

Looking at the policies of other countries provides some perspective on criminal justice in the United States. An international study of 15 countries—Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England and Wales, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Sweden, and Switzerland—notes that all have special provisions for young criminals in their justice systems, although some such as Denmark, Russia, and Sweden have no special courts for juveniles.

Table depicts some of the differences among countries, showing the range in variability for the minimum age of criminal responsibility, the age at which full responsibility as an adult can be assumed, the type of court that handles young people committing crimes, whether such young people can be tried in courts that also try adults, the maximum length of sentencing for a juvenile, and policies regarding incarcerating juveniles with adults.

The United States was not alone in seeing a dramatic increase in violent crime by juveniles in the s and early s. Many European countries and Canada experienced increases in their rates of violent crime, particularly among juveniles Hagan and Foster, ; Pfeiffer, It is difficult to compare rates across countries, because legal definitions of crime vary from country to country.

For example, in Germany, assault is counted as a violent crime only if a weapon is used during the commission of the crime, whereas in England and Wales, the degree of injury to the victim determines whether or not an assault counts as a violent crime.

Crime is also measured differently in each country. For example, the United States commonly relies on numbers of arrests to measure crime. In Germany, Austria, and Italy, among other countries, crime is measured by the number of cases solved by police even if the offender has been apprehended Pfeiffer, Nevertheless, trends in juvenile violent crime appeared similar in many developed countries in the s and early s, 2 although the rates were different.

The United States has a high violent crime rate—particularly for homicide—in comparison to other countries, although property crime rates, particularly burglary, are higher than U. In , the violent crime arrest rate includes homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and rape for to year-olds in the United.

Data from other countries after were not available to the panel at the time this report was written, so no comparisons for the latter half of the s were possible. Children's courts, which are part of the criminal justice system and deal with juveniles charged with a crime. States was nearly per , Federal Bureau of Investigation, In England and Wales, about per , to year-olds were convicted or cautioned by the police for violent crimes homicide, assault, robbery, and rape in In Germany, per , to year-olds and in The Netherlands per , to year-olds were suspects of violent crime in Pfeiffer, Comparing how different countries deal with juvenile offenders is equally challenging.

Countries differ in the ages of young people considered legal juveniles, in how juvenile courts are organized, and in the types of institution used to sanction juvenile offenders. As Table shows, the minimum age for being considered criminally responsible varies from 7 years in Switzerland and the Australian state of Tasmania to 16 in Belgium and Russia.

The age of full criminal responsibility i. In the United States, both minimum and maximum ages of juvenile court jurisdiction vary by state, with most states having no minimum age although in practice, children younger than 10 are seldom seen in juvenile courts.

The maximum age of juvenile court jurisdiction is younger in many U. At the same time that states and the federal government in the United States have been moving toward treating juvenile offenders more like adult criminals, many other countries retain a strong rehabilitative stance. The Youth Court Law of Austria, for example, describes juvenile offending as a normal step in development for which restorative justice, not punishment, is the appropriate response.

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