FREE ESSAY ON YOUR DEVIANCE

YOUR DEVIANCE

Deloach 1 Juvenile Criminals This newest phenomenon in the world of crime is perhaps the
most dangerous challenge facing society and law enforcement ever. They are younger, more
brutal, and completely unafraid of the law. Violent teenage criminals are increasingly
vicious. Young people, often from broken homes or so-called dysfunctional families, who
commit murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and other violent acts. These emotionally
damaged young people, often are the products of sexual or physical abuse. They live in an
aimless and violent present and have no sense of the past and no hope for the future.
These young criminals commit unspeakably brutal crimes against other people, often to
gratify whatever urges or desires drive them at the moment and their utter lack of
remorse is shocking (Worsham 1997). Studies reveal that the major cause of violent crime
is not poverty but family breakdown; specifically, the absence of a father in the
household. Today, one-fourth of all the children in the United States are living in
fatherless homes which adds up to 19 million children without fathers. Compared to
children in two parent family homes, these children will be twice as likely to drop out
of school, twice as likely to have children out of wedlock, and they stand more than
three times the chance of ending up in poverty, and almost ten times more likely to
commit violent crime and ending up in jail (Easton 1995). The Heritage Foundation, a
conservative think tank, reported that the rise in violent crime over the past 30 years
runs directly parallel to the rise in fatherless families. In every state in our country,
according to the Heritage foundation, the rate for juvenile crime is closely linked to
the percentage of children raised in single-parent families. While it has long been
thought that poverty is the primary cause of crime, the facts simply do not support this
view. Teenage criminal behavior has its roots in habitual deprivation of parental love
and affection going back to early infancy, according to the Heritage Foundation. A
father's attention to his son has enormous positive effects on a boy's emotional and
social development. Deloach 2 But a boy abandoned by his father is deprived of a deep
sense of personal security. In a well-functioning family the very presence of the father
embodies authority and this paternal authority is critical to the prevention of
psychopathology and delinquency . The overwhelming common factor that can be isolated in
determining whether young people will be criminal in their behavior is moral poverty,
Parker says (Parker 1996). Psychologists can predict by the age of 6 who'll be the
super-predators. According to experts, child abuse and parents addicted to alcohol ruins
these children's lives. Each generation of crime-prone boys has been about three times as
dangerous as the one before it. Psychologists believe the downhill slide into utter moral
bankruptcy is about to speed up because each generation of youth criminals is growing up
in more extreme conditions of moral poverty than the one before it. Moral poverty is
defined as growing up surrounded by deviant, delinquent, and criminal adults in abusive,
violence-ridden, fatherless, godless, and jobless settings. The super-predator is a breed
of criminal so dangerous that even the older inmates working their way through life
sentences complain that their youthful counterparts are out of control. Super predators
are raised in homes void of loving, capable, responsible adults who teach you right from
wrong. It is the poverty of being without parents, guardians, relatives, friends,
teachers, coaches, clergy and others who habituate you to feel joy at others' joy, pain
at others' pain, happiness when you do right, remorse when you do wrong. It is the
poverty of growing up in the virtual absence of people who teach these lessons by their
own everyday example, and who insist that you follow suit and behave accordingly (Zoglin
1996). "The need to rebuild and resurrect the civil society (families, churches,
community groups) of high-crime, drug-plagued urban neighborhoods is not an intellectual
or research hypothesis that requires testing. It's a moral and social imperative that
requires doing - and doing now (Duin 1996)." A super predator is actually a young
psychopath or psychotic, almost completely without Deloach 3 ambition, and are often of
below average intelligence. They do not recognize, intellectually or otherwise, any rules
of society. While psychopaths and the super-predator both share the inability to feel
emotion, the psychopath can feign it to achieve a result. The super predator seems
completely incapable of even that. More interestingly, the super predator is remarkably
candid. They will more often than not admit not only to their crimes, but also as to the
why. They feel as if nothing wrong was done and would do it again if placed in the same
situation. When asked what was triggering the explosion of violence among today's young
street criminals, a group of life-term New Jersey prisoners did not voice the
conventional explanations such as economic poverty or joblessness. Instead, these
hardened men cited the absence of people - family, adults, teachers, preachers, coaches
who would care enough about young males to nurture and discipline them (Zoglin 1996).
Even more shocking than the sheer volume of violent juvenile crime is the brutality of
the crime committed for trivial motives: a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a real or imagined
insult, and a momentary cheap thrill. For example: a 59-year-old man out on a morning
stroll in Lake Tahoe was fatally shot four times by teenagers looking for someone to
scare. The police say the four teenagers, just 15 and 16 years old, were thrill shooting.
Another example can be the case of a 12-year-old and two other youths were charged with
kidnapping a 57-year-old man and taking a joy ride in his Toyota. As the man pleaded for
his life, the juveniles shot him to death (Duin 1996). Deloach 4 `Works Cited 1. Duin,
Julia "Alarm over crime puts focus on our nation's moral crisis"., The Washington Times,
11-17-1996, pp 31. 2. Easton, Nina J "The Crime Doctor Is In; But Not Everyone Likes
Professor. JohnDiIulio's Message," There Is No Big Fix; Home Edition., Los Angeles Times,
05-02-1995, pp E-1. 3. Parker, Shafer, Violence With a Youthful Face.., Vol. 23, Alberta
Report /Western Report, 06-17-1996, pp 27. 4. Richard Zoglin Reported By Sam Allis/Boston
And Ratu Kamlani, "New York, Crime: Now For the Bad News: A Teenage Time Bomb ", TIME,
01-15-1996, pp 52+. 5. Worsham, James-Blakely, Stephen-al, et, Crime and Drugs., Vol. 85,
Nation's Business, 02-01-1997, pp 24.