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Study Finds Delinquent Behavior Among Boys Is "Contagious"
According to a new study, if everyone else was committing a crime, you would too, at least if you are a boy. The 20-year study showed what every grandmother could tell you; children from poor families, with inadequate supervision and bad friends were more likely to end up in juvenile court. What was more surprising is that exposure to the juvenile justice system seemed to increase the chance that the boy would engage in criminal activity as a young adult. "For boys who had been through the juvenile justice system, compared to boys with similar histories without judicial involvement, the odds of adult judicial interventions increased almost seven-fold," says study co-author Richard E. Tremblay.
Delinquents are teaching delinquents now? Back when I was a juvenile delinquent we didn't have any "internet" or "correctional facilities" to show us how. If you wanted to be a delinquent you had to learn it and earn it yourself, by breaking and entering to a house that was 3 miles away in the snow uphill both way and guarded by gargoyles. Today's youth just want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Lazy little bastards. that's the Now get off my lawn.
The bad kids need to be identified as early as possible, and shunted off into a different program where they're prepared for careers as janitors and burger-flippers
Great. Take a whole bunch of criminals, and give them keys to go into your office after hours, and have them prepare your food.
If only the Department of Health in England could have read this before they spent millions placing kids with higher risk to be a teenage parent in a room with each other, then they wouldn't have been suprised when the pregnancy rates jumped.
Clearly, they should have been thinly distributed amongst the chess clubs and mathlete societies, where they would have either benefited from the complete lack of sex or been instrumental in breeding a new race of promiscuous geeks.
Heh. Yeah, the "If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?" always confused me as a child.
Growing up in Oregon, two things we had in abundance were rivers and bridges over them.
Some bridges are too high, or the water too shallow, to jump off the bridge into the river below.
One way to tell is to see where everyone else is jumping in at. If they swim back to shore and climb back up you know it's safe. (For various values of "safe".)
Which is a longish way of saying the answer to the question is, "Well, yeah. Of course."
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.