juvenile delinquency

Posted: November 28th, 2013

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Juvenile Delinquency

Introduction

Juvenile delinquencies have been on the rise over the past few years. In the past, there were rare occasions where children or teenagers would be found committing crimes. However, according to a survey, crimes committed by children are on the rise. When these children have committed crimes, they should be punished so that they can change their behaviors. Therefore, when the states are creating strategies to be used in helping the children change from their habits of crime, they should consider the objective. The objective is to reform or rehabilitate the child from the life of crime to become a good person. For this reason, there are those strategies preferred for the rehabilitation of child delinquencies and those strategies that will do more harm than good.

Discussion

The main aim of punishing juvenile delinquents is to rehabilitate them and make them the future leaders. For this reason, there are strategies that are excellent for rehabilitating the children. The first strategy is counseling. In counseling, the relevant authorities have a wide variety that they could use in order to try to achieve maximum efficiency in rehabilitating juvenile delinquents. Most of the children commit the different crimes due to something that might have affected them emotionally. In this situation the children require counseling so that they can solve the problems that might be disturbing them (Mulvey, Michael and Dickon 2007). This is a good strategy because it does not harm the child. Instead, it is molding the behavior of a child to become a better person in the future.

In this case, the authorities should try to establish the areas that are currently being violated. This means that the different authorities need to establish the different crimes committed by the teenagers. After they have established this, they should create a training program that will help the different children be rehabilitated. This way there are will be many professionals who have the expertise of rehabilitating the children. After the different people have been trained, they should be placed in the field where they can put their expertise into practice. This strategy will reduce the rate of children delinquency. In addition, it will reduce the rate at which the juvenile delinquents are becoming hardcore criminals once they are in the justice system.

On the issue of the counseling, most children who are cold-blooded killers are often mentally ill. At some point these children were mistreated in their life causing them to become killers. When they are charged as adults without considering the possibility of counseling, it will never be known why the child became a killer. Additionally, the child will never become treated and become a better person. Moreover, when the child is taken to the prison he or she might end up become injured or even killed in the prison (Mulvey, Michael and Dickon 2007). This means that it would be a wasted talent in the society. In this case, the strategy of counseling is the best because it will not hurt the delinquent instead it will create a good person out of the delinquent.

The second strategy is placing the juvenile delinquents under guardianship. This is where those children who have committed minor offences are kept. This is where the different delinquents should be placed in care of a person who will work as a counselor and as a mentor to these young children. If these children are locked together with the other children in juvenile facilities, they will become harden instead of being rehabilitated. In this case, the government should consider a suitable method to train these people who are going to be placed under guardianship of these children.

One advantage of guardianship of the delinquents or the supervisors is that the child’s freedom is limited. Many people think that the child will be able to access all the things that he or she used to access before. This is not the case because the children are expected to adhere to what their guardian or their supervisors are saying. The guardian, being a trained professional in such a situation, he or she is able to devise a mechanism that he or she can apply to help the children rehabilitate. In this case, the child will be punished and they will be rehabilitated at the same time.

In this case, it will reduce the amount of space in the juvenile institutions. The number of juvenile crime cases has been increasing over the past few years. As a result, it has caused juveniles to be crowded at the juvenile delinquencies centers. Secondly, it is going to reduce the amount of money spent in the juvenile centers. Maintaining juveniles is extremely expensive. This is because the delinquents need to eat, the guards need a salary and they need resources like education. On the other hand, if these children are kept together they tend to insight one another. Therefore, instead of becoming good children, they graduate and become hardcore criminals. Therefore, when a guardian is placed in charge of a delinquent, he or she has higher chances of becoming a good person in future as opposed to those people who are in the juvenile institutions.

Guardianship is also effective in rehabilitating a child because the guardian has only one or two children to rehabilitate. In this situation, he or she is able to concentrate fully to the delinquent. For instance, when the children are sent to the juvenile centers or the prisons, the guards or the people who have the duty in rehabilitating them have difficulty in concentrating on a one delinquent. In this case, the children will not be fully rehabilitated because there is no concentrating to rehabilitate.

The other strategy involves community children program. These strategies are aimed at preventing gang crimes by children. Many children are prone entering into gangs. According to statistics, children feel comfortable when they are with their peers as opposed to when they are at home with their parents. These gangs do not perform good things in the society. These gangs are involved in all sorts of crimes in the society (Wyrick and Howell 2004). To prevent this from happening, the community child programs are used as a strategy to prevent the children from becoming delinquents. This means that this strategy will lower the rates of juvenile delinquency.

In this case, the government or the state creates different programs in the society that will enhance the youth coming together in the name of stopping crime. For instance, the government enhances this strategy to the schools where the teachers are empowered to create activities that will ensure that children come together and work together (Wyrick and Howell 2004). Additionally, other organizations like churches have created programs where there are activities for the teenagers to perform. In this situation, the children are occupied with something. This reduces the amount of idle time. This is because when the children are idle most of the time they end up committing crimes as compared to when they are idle in the neighborhoods.

On the other hand, there are those strategies that make the delinquents to be hardcore criminals rather than rehabilitating them. One of these strategies is punishing these delinquents as adults. When a child is charged as an adult, he or she is likely going to meet other hardcore criminals in the prison. These hardcore criminals will be a bad example to the child and eventually the child will become more of a criminal than becoming rehabilitated. According to surveys done, many children who end up in the prison, graduate and become hardcore criminals.

Secondly, a child can be injured or even be killed in a prison. Prisons contain adult criminals who are hardcore and violent. In most case, there is a lot of homosexuality that goes on in the prisons. Those criminals who are strong often bully the weak prisoners and make them their ‘wives’ in the prisons. In this case, most of the children who are arrested are weak. They do not have the strength to defend themselves when they are in the prisons. As a result, they end up becoming sodomized. This results in the children being at a risk of contracting venereal diseases.

On the other hand, the prison causes emotional disturbances to the children. There are certain things that the children should not be exposed to. These activities may be obscene, vulgar or violent. When children see these, they end up becoming emotionally disturbed. This trauma can lead to long-term effects. In this case, the child will no longer have normal lives when they grow up to become adults in life. Therefore, the strategies of punishing children as adults are not the best strategies because the child might be injured both physically and emotionally. Additionally, these children turn out to become hardcore criminals.

However, there are circumstances where these children should be taken to prisons according to law. For instance, there are those children who are cold-blooded killers. The state believes that this child should be convicted in a court of law like adults and taken to prisons. However, not all the times all the children meant to kill; there are situations where the child is mentally ill. In this case, if the child is taken to prison, instead of helping him or her it is worsening the situation. The child will continue to become a cold-blooded killer and eventually he or she will die a lonely life. Therefore, the government or the different states should not consider using this strategy because it is bad. It should always be the last result.

The other strategy is to let some of the cases pass. In most cases, a child learns through what is done to them and others. Therefore, when a court of law decides to offer light sentences to this juveniles especially to those petty offenders, they might not take this seriously. In this case, they will mock the system and they are likely to repeat the same offences again. In this case, the child will be encouraged to perform more crimes instead of rehabilitating. As a result, the whole meaning of rehabilitation will lose value. Therefore, the government or the state should consider other means of showing seriousness to the children so that they cannot repeat the same mistake another time.

However, it is not practicable for court to convict underage smokers or drug abusers to life sentences to prove the seriousness of the case. This is because the court will have destroyed the life of that child. Additionally, the court will worsen the situation by creating a criminal instead of rehabilitating the child. On the other hand, it is not practicable to sentences a child in community service. In most cases, the judges end up letting the child get away with these petty offences on the grounds of humanity. This results to encouragement of the child repeating the same crimes.

The last strategy will is intimidation. Children are not supposed to be intimidated. This is because when a child is intimidated, he or she will eventually commit the crimes once he or she attains the freedom. On the other hand, the child self esteem will lower making the child not to have a normal life. Additionally, the child will grow up in constant fear. Children are supposed to be happy at all times. They are supposed to enjoy their childhood life. Therefore, when they grow up in constant fear, they will eventually end having an abnormal life. Hence, the strategy of intimidation is not the best to use.

Another problem of intimidation of small children is that it does not solve the problem. This is because the purpose of intimidation is instilling fear on the child. In this case, the child has not been explained as to why the crime he or she has committed is wrong. Additionally, the child has not yet been told how to cope with certain problems. For instance, a child might commit a crime due to a certain problem. As a result, the child is intimidated. In this case, the child will never understand how to solve some of these problems. This results to the child committing the same crime or the child having an abnormal life while growing up.

`Finally, intimidation is like child abuse. According to low parents and other relevant authorities are not supposed to intimidate a child. Despite the fact that the child has committed crimes it is not good to intimidate a child. This is because it might lead to long-term effects. On the other hand, it can cause mental illness on a child, which is extremely bad for the children. Intimidation is also child abuse on the sense that parents or guardians can use it to take advantage on the child (American Prosecutors Research Institute and National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse 451). A child does not have the capability to make decision on his or her own. Therefore, a guardian or a parent might end up taking advantage of the child due to this vulnerability.

Conclusion

The purposes of preventing or solving child delinquency cases is to rehabilitate a child from a criminal to a better person who can be able to make good decisions in future, with this in mind the government should consider those strategies of solving and preventing juvenile delinquencies that help in effective rehabilitation. The first strategy the government should consider is counseling. This is because it offers the delinquent an opportunity of becoming a better person. Secondly, they should consider guardianship. It also contributes greatly to rehabilitation. The other strategy is the community programs that involve activities. On the other hand, they should avoid adult punishment, intimidation and light sentencing. This is because they do not promote rehabilitation.

Works cited

American Prosecutors Research Institute and National Center for the Prosecution of Child Abuse. Investigation and prosecution of child abuse. New York: NY, Sage Publishers, 2004. Print.

Mulvey, Edward., Michael W. Arthur, and N. Dickon Reppucci. The prevention of juvenile Delinquency: A review of the research. tpronline.org. 2 November 2007. Web. 3 February 2012.

Wyrick, Phelan and Howell James. Strategic Risk-Based Responses to Youth Gangs. National Youth Gang Center. September 2004. Web. 3 February 2012.