Early intervention prevents juvenile delinquency
Describe The Topic Clearly
Early intervention programs have proved to be the most effective prior to the onset of delinquent behavior as they are capable to prevent juvenile delinquency. Early involvement in children’s lives serves as an initial prerequisite of the effective elimination of juvenile crimes and a core deterrent of the misdeeds at an early age. Prevention programs are productive deterrents that primarily stop the crimes from happening. To make a prevention program successful, it should be comprehensive in its nature. Namely, holistic programs prevent future crimes better as they are aimed at coping with the various aspects and diverse issues of juvenile life. Early intervention and comprehensiveness are the two core factors that provide a head start for any influential program pursuing to target specific risk factors causing delinquent behavior. Once the risk factors are eliminated, the occurrence of the problem behavior becomes much less likely.
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"Early Intervention Prevents Juvenile Delinquency".
Include A Brief Explanation Of Why You Chose This Topic
Juvenile justice prevention programs should be effectively implemented to deter criminal behaviors of the involved children as they occur on the early stages of a child’s development and emphasize on holistic aspects of a child’s life instead of the nature of crime itself. At that, the implementation procedures should assume such crucial factors as prenatal difficulties, fetal substance exposure, violent and abusive family conditions altogether considered as the major risk factors that cause juvenile delinquency and result in violent behavior. In particular, early intervention program executives should consider such adverse preconditions of child’s living and development as insufficient parental supervision, poor child raising practices, criminal siblings and parents, large family size, low family income, low intelligence, poor housing, and improper educational achievement. These important risks should be intervened at the early stages so that cannot pass through into adulthood.
Describe the History of the Problem and Why It is a Problem
As stated in the “Encyclopedia of Juvenile Justice”, juvenile delinquency is “criminal and analogously deviant behavior committed by children and adolescents under the legal age of adulthood” (McShane & Williams, 2003, p.119). In the United States, juvenile delinquency is treated differentially depending on how severe the offence was. The system that deals with juvenile offenders today has been shaped by a few social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. Historically, the major American movements at the turn of the 20th century – Child Savers, The Chicago Juvenile Court Movement, the Progressives – aimed to protect the rights of children involved in youth crime. They contributed greatly into how the delinquents are treated within the juvenile justice system today. Historically, those movements laid the foundation for distinguishing between grown-up and young offenders, as well as the basis of today’s juvenile justice system. In addition, many current kinds of remedial delinquency treatment (probation, for instance) and prevention programs are rooted into the ideas of the early movements. The goal of the prevention programs is twofold: to address the needs of young people in general and to help youth build resiliency and strength.
Despite the rich historical legacy of treating juvenile delinquents and some progress in preventing juvenile crime, levels of juvenile delinquency in the United States are still very high. Statistically, young offenders were known to have committed 8% of all homicides in 2010. As for the number of arrests, that same year there were 225 arrests for every 100,000 young people aged 10-17 for the offenses according to Violent Crime Index (CrimeSolitions.Gov, 2014).
High rates of juvenile crime warrant increase in the number and improvement of the quality of preventive interventions and social research that would help select the most adequate strategies to address the issue of juvenile delinquency in accordance with the realities of the modern world and kinds of crimes that juveniles are typically involved in (Manning, Smith, & Homel, 2013). Thus, search for effective programs that would help prevent rise of juvenile delinquency and help young people build up their moral strength and resiliency is of utmost importance (Loeber & Farrington, 2011).
Identify Where and for Whom It is a Problem
Design and implementation of early prevention programs has been the focus of governmental agencies, policymakers, school counselors, crime prevention researchers, human capital scholars, developmental psychologists, and social activists. Researchers have observed multiple early prevention programs and designed the criteria applicable to existing programs, which help distinguish between the most and the least effective interventions (Manning, Smith, & Homel, 2013). Scholars from various domains – social, legal, psychological, and medical – are concerned about the issue of juvenile delinquency and work on preventive measures to reduce the youth crime rate (Gorgen, Evenepoel, Kraus, Taefi, 2013). In the sphere of criminal justice research, Howell (2003) provides a comprehensive framework for understanding and assessing current juvenile court system and programs aimed at prevention of juvenile crime.
Identify the Purpose of Your Research on This Problem
The purpose of the research will be to establish factors that have an impact on the efficacy of one early crime prevention program. This will help formulate general features of all efficient early crime prevention programs.
- CrimeSolutions.Gov (2014). Juveniles. Retrieved from
http://www.crimesolutions.gov/TopicDetails.aspx?ID=5. - Gorgen, T., Evenepoel, A., Kraus, B., & Taefi, A. (2013). Prevention of juvenile crime and
deviance: Adolescents and experts’ views in an international perspective.
Varstvoslovje, 15 (4), 531-550. - Howell, J. C. (2003). Preventing and Reducing Juvenile Delinquency: A Comprehensive
Framework. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. - Loeber, R. & Farrington, D. (2011). Young homicide offenders and victims: risk factors, prediction, and prevention from childhood. Longitudinal Research in the Social and Behavioral Sciences: An Interdisciplinary Series
- Manning, M., Smith, C. and Homel, R. (2013), Valuing developmental crime prevention.
Criminology & Public Policy, 12, 305–332.
