Juvenile Delinquincy And The Ageing Out Process

5 Pages 1177 Words

At what point do juveniles discontinue delinquent thinking and behavior? Does a juvenile’s age environment or identity effect their delinquent behavior? If the “ageing out theory” is concrete, then what factors are decisive in this phenomenon? I would like to examine what causes juvenile delinquency and if the aging out process is a cause of nature or society.
In the year 2000, juveniles were responsible for 17% of all arrests, 53% of arsons and 33% of property crime committed in the United States (1). In that same year there were 7,327 arrests for every 100,000 youth ages 10-18 in the U.S (2). Although this number has dropped since the early 1980’s when juvenile crime was on the rise it is still high. To help understand why these statistics are so high we need to understand the theories behind why juveniles commit crime. There are several factors which are currently being attributed to juvenile delinquency ranging from socioeconomic status and neighborhood quality to ones identity perception or age.
Travis Hirschi and Michael Gottfredson are renowned criminologist who have been theorizing about delinquency for over 30 years. Their theory on the aging out process is that age and crime has remained the same for years and therefor age is not connected to crime. Regardless of ones enviornmental issues (family, peers, race and gender) they have consistently phased out of criminal activity over their life span (3). One example that Hirschi and Gottfredson give is that crime and age are always a constant through out the life cycle. If a 15 year old boy is 4 times more likely to commit crime than a 15 year old girl, then a 50 year old man will be 4 times more likely to commit crime than a 50 year old woman (4). Not all criminologists share this same view though and have actually disregarded it as much to generalized rather than specialized.
According to criminologist Kyle Kercher, personal factors (such as gender and race) and s...