Delinquency And Violence Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Delinquency is commonly associated with violent behavior. Chances are that when people are asked what they commonly perceive as delinquent behavior, youth violence will not be far from their minds. Although the specter of youth violence has fueled fears about crime generally, and moral panics erupt every so often about so-called super predators or youth gangs, the vast majority of delinquent behavior is nonviolent. Delinquent behavior generally peaks at around age 16, yet the peak for violent crime comes a little later in the life course. This is not to say that young people under the age of 18 do not commit violent acts—they do—but they do so in fewer numbers than is commonly perceived. This essay discusses not only the extent of violent delinquency in the United States but also the explanations for and public responses to violent delinquency.

The Extent Of Violent Delinquency In The United States

Delinquency is an illegal act committed by a minor, and what is known about delinquency has been gleaned from a number of different sources. The first source of data on delinquency is the annual arrest data collated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from most law enforcement agencies in the United States. Recent arrest data show that law enforcement agencies made an estimated 2.14 million juvenile arrests in 2005. In terms of juvenile arrests for violent behavior, there were 95,300 made for violent index crimes—murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault—and a further 247,900 arrests made for other assaults. What this means is that in real terms only 4.4% of juvenile arrests were for serious violent offenses, and a further 11.5% were for simple assaults or assaults where no weapon was used.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using official sources of data. The advantage is that one can get a sense of the trends in arrests over time because the data are collated annually. So in terms of violent delinquency the trends of the past two decades illustrate that arrests for serious violent crime peaked in the early 1990s, with the juvenile arrest rate for murder peaking in 1991 at 13.1 per 100,000. Since then, juvenile arrests for violence have decreased markedly, the arrest rate for murder being 3.8 per 100,000 in 2005. There have been similar declines in arrests for other serious violent offenses. For instance, between 1996 and 2005, juvenile arrests for rape declined 25%, while there were declines of 34% and 20% for robbery and aggravated assault, respectively. In terms of arrest then, one can conclude from the available data that violent delinquency has decreased from its high water mark in the early 1990s, though there is a perception that the United States is poised for another increase. While arrest statistics give one a general idea of the trends in violent delinquency, there are a number of drawbacks with respect to relying solely on official data. In the first place the data only count the total number of arrests, which does not account for an individual being arrested multiple times in a year, nor for an individual arrested once, but charged with multiple offenses. More importantly, official data do not count those who committed illegal acts but who were never arrested.

Self-reports are a second set of data that researchers commonly rely upon for a sense of the extent of violence among minors. Self-report studies are designed to capture the so-called hidden figure of crime, that is, those acts committed but never officially recorded, and they do this by simply asking individuals to self-disclose delinquent acts. Generally, self-report studies have shown delinquency to be more widespread than official statistics would have one believe. There are several notable self-report studies that illustrate the prevalence of violent behavior among young people. For example, Monitoring the Future is an ongoing national sample of 12th graders that is conducted annually by the University of Michigan, and it calculates a violence index, based on how respondents answer five questions about violent behavior. The violence index has remained remarkably stable over time, and it shows that approximately 30% of 12th graders surveyed have engaged in at least one of the five violent acts specified, which range from hitting a teacher to injuring a person badly enough that he or she required medical attention. The latter category, called assault with injury, had an average prevalence of about 12% over the 10-year period from 1988 to 1998. That this prevalence rate is high reveals the disjuncture between official and self report data, but it is also indicative of the fact that the subjects interviewed had an average age of 18, which is just about the peak age for violent offending. Other self-report studies use different questions to assess the prevalence rate for violence among minors, but their results reveal similar prevalence rates. The National Youth Survey reports an average of 9% prevalence in serious violent delinquency-aggravated assault, gang fights, robbery, and rape among 17-year-olds interviewed in the 1976 and 1982 waves of that longitudinal study.

The self-report studies demonstrate how the arrest data underestimate the prevalence of violence among minors, but as with official statistics, there are drawbacks to relying solely on self-reports. In the first place, there are differences between self-report studies in the questions that they use to ascertain prevalence levels and, in some cases, the questions used focus on trivial offenses. There is also the possibility that respondents may exaggerate their involvement, thus inflating the prevalence levels.

The third variant of data that is used to assess violent delinquency is victimization data, specifically those data reported in the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). The NCVS is collected annually from a large sample of households, and it asks people to report victim experiences. Routinely, the results from the NCVS show that individuals do not report about half of all violent crime, and this holds true for minors as well as adults.

Taken together, these three sources of data illustrate that while only a small amount of delinquent behavior is violent, a large proportion of youth admit to engaging in violent behavior. It is known from studies of desistance that the vast majority of offenders will eventually cease engaging in illegal behavior, but because the peak age for committing violent offenses occurs in the mid to late teens, it follows that violent delinquency garners a great deal of attention from scholars and policymakers. The former group has proffered a variety of explanations as to why minors engage in violence, while the latter group has come up with ways to prevent and/or reduce juvenile violence.

Explanations For Violent Delinquency

Explanations for the causes of youth violence are plentiful, and this essay concentrates on three broad types of argument: those that advocate structural, cultural, or psychological lines of reasoning. The first category of explanation examines how structural factors are largely what drive youth violence. So, for example, some scholars see violent delinquency as being due to demographics, in that when there is a large generation of teenagers, there will be more crime. However, the simple demographic model has come under criticism in that it failed to predict the steady decreases in youth violence that have occurred from the mid-1990s into the present at the same time as the teenage population has increased. A more widely accepted structural argument concerning violent delinquency is one that views it as an epidemic. This explanation holds that violence behaves in ways similar to disease, and can spread rapidly when a certain mix of factors is in place. So, for example, the much vaunted high water mark of youth violence in the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s was due to the structural factors that sustained this epidemic, such as the increased availability of guns and the instability of urban drug markets, and levels of youth violence have decreased as the contributory conditions have changed. A final variant of structural explanations examines the ecological and structural context in which much youth violence occurs. Scholars in this tradition point to the fact that youth violence is concentrated in certain types of neighborhoods, characterized by concentrated disadvantage, low social controls, and low levels of collective efficacy. It is the combination of these ecological factors that allows youth violence to flourish, though not all young people exposed to these conditions commit violent acts. In sum, structural explanations focus more on the aggregate than on the individual, which contrasts with cultural explanations of violent delinquency.

Cultural explanations of youth violence hold that young people engage in violent acts because they are conforming to the norms of their group. Such cultural analyses are used to explain the presence and activities of youth gangs and the violence that is often associated with them. Though there are several variants of the cultural approach, the most widespread are those that argue for a subculture of violence, and those that view violence as part of a wider cultural adaptation to a marginal status. The subculture of violence theory argues that cultural norms and values, particularly among lower class people, call for the use of violence in certain social situations, and violence is thus normative for people socialized into this culture. The cultural adaptation approach is a variation on the subculture of violence explanation and holds that many people adapt to a marginal social position by imbuing a tough reputation and the maintenance of respect with an elevated status. One must maintain one’s reputation by violent means if necessary, and similarly, any disrespect must be met with violence or the threat thereof. This so-called street code then explains how high levels of violence endure in many low status neighborhoods. Subcultural explanations of violent delinquency, and of gang violence especially, have proven popular and controversial in equal measure. The chief criticism of the cultural approach is that it overstates the normative nature of violent behavior and overestimates the extent of immersion in an oppositional culture on the part of subjects.

Psychological explanations form a third major approach commonly used to account for youth violence. Psychological explanations focus on the individual and explain youth violence as being due to an excess of risk factors for violent behavior over protective factors that inhibit such acting out. Common risk factors that can predispose individuals to violence are exposure to violence, being a victim of violence, and displaying early antisocial behavior. Several scholars in the psychological camp argue that violence is an adaptation to risk factors, which can cause future problems for the individual but which also is an alternative to depression or other self-destructive behaviors. A frequent criticism of psychological explanations is that they underplay the fundamentally situated and group nature of much violent delinquency.

Public Policy Responses

Violent delinquency is an area of periodic controversy, and public policy responses tend to reflect this fact in that they have been mainly reactive and punitive in the recent past. As levels of violent delinquency rose to their high point in the early 1990s, the most widespread policy response became the waiver system, in which cases involving minors are waived from the jurisdiction of juvenile to adult courts. All states have juvenile waiver laws for certain serious violent crimes, usually homicide and robbery, and this has resulted in a more punitive approach being taken toward violent delinquents. Trying juveniles as adults and incarcerating them in the adult prison system has not been effective in reducing recidivism, though advocates argue that the deterrent effect has been instrumental in reducing rates of violent delinquency.

A second type of delinquency intervention program that has been linked with some success is the intensive parole and probation programs that formed the mainstay of the so-called Boston model. In this approach, authorities singled out the youth most likely to be violent, who were either on probation or being paroled from juvenile detention, and they aggressively monitored them and attempted to build upon their prosocial attachments in terms of education and employment. The program, which entailed multiagency cooperation, claimed success in that there were no youth homicides in Boston over an 18-month period. Though the Boston model has been imitated elsewhere, the successes have not been as spectacular.

There are other approaches that are reactive but less punitive, such as the use of restorative justice approaches, including shaming circles. These programs are designed as alternatives to the conventional juvenile justice system and require that the juvenile offender encounter the people that she or he has wronged and, in many cases, make reparation and restitution to them. Though restorative justice is more commonly used for nonviolent crimes, it is increasingly being employed in cases of violent delinquency, with mostly positive results in terms of recidivism and victim satisfaction.

Though it is uncertain as to whether the punitive turn has had the desired effects with regard to reducing violent delinquency, being tough on young violent offenders is still the predominant policy response in the United States.

Bibliography:

Butts, J. A., & Snyder, H. N. (2007, Spring). Where are the juvenile crime trends headed? Juvenile and Family Justice Today, pp. 16–21.
Cook, P. J., & Laub, J. H. (1998). The unprecedented epidemic in youth violence. In M. Tonry & M. H. Moore (Eds.), Youth violence (pp. 27–64). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cook, P. J., & Laub, J. H. (2002). After the epidemic: Recent trends in youth violence in the United States. In M. Tonry (Ed.), Crime and justice: A review of research (pp. 1–29). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Satcher, D. (2001). Youth violence: A report of the surgeon general. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

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