Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Treatment

Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Treatment Name: Course: Instructor: Institution: Date: Juvenile Delinquency Prevention and Treatment Juvenile delinquency refers, also known as youth crime, refers to minor’s participation in illegal or unlawful behaviors and practices. Minors, in this context, refer to people under the age of 18 years. Individuals, under the age of 18, but commit crimes that would be chargeable and punishable if done by adults, are referred to as juvenile delinquents. The age makes it a controversy on whether to handle juvenile delinquents in courts as adults as some nations lack a proper system of handing youth criminal offenders. Youth nowadays, irrespective of gender, country of residence or gender are exposed to individual risks as well as new individual opportunities. Some of these opportunities are beneficial; others are harmful. Mostly, advantages are taken over the harmful opportunities and most young people commit different crimes. Such crimes include drug abuse, use of violence against their peers and theft. Statistical data show that virtually all countries in the world, except the US, the rate or increase in the number of juvenile delinquents has been high since 1990s. In the Western Europe, research reveals that arrest of under-age offenders and juvenile delinquents has been on the verge of increased by approximately 50% between 1980 and 1990 ( Dishion, 2006). Further researches show that many of these offences have close relationship excessive alcohol use and drug abuse. Several programs and studies that deal with juvenile delinquencies have their focus on the youth as the only offenders. Nonetheless, adolescents are also prone victims of delinquent and criminal acts. Based on the crime data produced by the police, it is evidenced that over 80% of violent actions are never reported by the victims. Studies and information from this gives a leeway for coming up with a conclusion that most of these unreported offences are done by people of young age on their age mates. There are various programs used in correcting delinquents currently existing. People who get involved in delinquent after the occurrence of deviant behaviors tend to be less successful since they usually develop antisocial behaviors. In such cases, more effective programs are ones that are appropriate for intervention before delinquent behavior symbols appear on the young people. These programs aim at preventing such behaviors from the young individuals. Getting involved in the children’s lives at early stages significantly reduces the occurrences of crimes. Prevention programs usually involve the public, as their aim is to stop the crimes from opening at early stages of children’s lives. Research shows that the programs that are more holistic than others prevent successfully future crimes as they concentrate on certain aspects of the lives of children; and not just a single one. Two programs that have shown a reduction in child crime rate include comprehensiveness and early intervention. The two are programs that involve individuals visiting different homes and have the nature of Head Start ( Dishion, 2006). The programs aim at identifying and dealing with specific risk factors that can possibly act as prerequisite to delinquents behavioral practices. Once these factors are lessened, the targeted behavior in youth tends to disappear and their occurrences are prevented. Conclusively, juvenile justice prevention plans like early childhood and prenatal nurse attendance Head Start and programs have become more successful in dealing with the problem of juvenile practices in effective manner. This is because, the programs aim at working on a child’s possible suspicious behaviors and using sociological and psychological means to counter them ensuring that a child’s growth is guided well in a responsible and harmless manner. In short, the two programs do not focus on the crime since it is not evident at this stage, but they focus on the children who look prone to participate in criminal activities during their developmental stages. Despite the fact that it may be difficult to completely or successfully predict that a child will behave in a manner that will expose him/her to be criminals in future days, there are many risk factors that have been revealed to correlate with the behaviors. These include prenatal difficulties, fetal behaviors, violent and abusive family backgrounds. All these are considered as weaknesses and can easily lead to violent behaviors in children. Others that may also lead to several later frequent offending include poor and improper parent supervision, low family income or poverty, poor and inappropriate child rearing practices, law educational attainments, low intelligence, large family size and poor housing (Mihalick et al, 2002). Besides, sexual and physical abuses are other specific risk factors portraying or revealing homicidal dangerous behavioral practices. The early onsets of certain unnecessary antisocial behaviors are also associated with severe or perilous outcomes with the antisocial behaviors that do occur later in lives of the young people. These risk factors usually reveal complicated connections to the respective problem behaviors and not just increasing the problem directly. For instance, low level of intelligence in children is considered a serious risk factor because children with low intelligence are likely to do poorly in school. Besides, such children also do have problems of mental retardation. All these factors have close correlation with parental physical abuse. Thus, a kid with lower than normal intelligent level and has the problem of parental abuse is obliged to face two main external events precluding the delinquent outcomes. Socioeconomic status is also considered another serious risk factor (Delbert, 1997). Some studies reveal that socioeconomic risks have direct associations with certain delinquent behaviors whereas others assert that regardless of these socioeconomic factors, the children raised by unsupportive caregivers and distressed families in unstable families did have greater chances of developing unnecessary dangerous behavioral habits compared to the children nurtured in supportive homes under the care of good caregivers. Therefore, professional sociologists recommend combination of factors as well as the interactions among them as the best preventive and forecasting method of dealing with any possible occurrences of underage criminal behaviors in societies. There are other prevention programs including education, community involvement, and recreation, bullying prevention, functional family therapy and parent-child interaction program. Education personalities have come up with model programs aimed at assisting families and children through the provision of information on raising children in a more responsible and healthy manner (Mihalick et al, 2002). These programs also teach children about the dangers of gangs, drug abuse, premature sexual practices, and careless handling or use of weapons. The programs also aim at making the youth aware that their actions do have consequences that are actually threats to their lives. This is a crucial programs in the era where there is barraging of youths with violent and sexual images. Recreation is another important method of preventing juvenile delinquents. One of the most important impacts of recreation is that children feel unsupervised after going through strict school schedules (Delbert, 1997). This feeling has an effect of imposing into them the sense of responsibility. It leaves them with the puzzle and choice on what is right to be done and that which is wrong to be rejected. The practices also give the youth opportunities to interact with other people, mainly adults in the society and learn from them the various crucial lifestyles that may help them avoid future criminal activities at the age less than 18. Community involvement methods include such methods like church youth scouts, voluntary groups, boy scouts, and church scouts within communities. Involvement in the community g...