Slashdot Mirror
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.
There's money in prisons, pointless drug laws etc. It's not an accident things work out this way.
"Boys more likely to do what the other boys in their peer group are doing. Juvenile delinquents teach juveniles to be delinquents."
Another amazing result by the Maximegallion Institute for Slowly and Painfully Working Out the Surprisingly Obvious.
The enemies of Democracy are
This may be true: sticking the bad kids in with the good kids may improve the behavior of the bad kids. BUT BE WARNED! I was part of an educational experiment in which honors students (such as myself) were placed in an 6th-grade English class with, well, the criminal class.
I LEARNED NOTHING IN THAT CLASS! The teacher spent the whole time playing cop to stop the delinquents. Furthermore, sticking us in with them actually encouraged the good students to out-bad the bad students. It was a complete disaster.
For the good of this country, we need to concentrate on making sure our best students get the best education. This should be a higher priority than trying to make scientists out of juvenile criminals and bullies. Society doesn't need, and will never get 100% genius-status for all students, anyway. Attempts to make this happen will likely drag us all down.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
My grandfather used to say that "One boy is a boy, two boys are half a boy, and three boys are no boy at all." Meaning that when boys get together they have less good sense than one boy by himself does.
Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
I've always maintained that the IQ of a group of boys is calculated by taking the lowest IQ in the group and dividing it by the number of boys in the group. When my son was growing up, he and his friends demonstrated this over and over. My parents maintain that when I was growing up that my friends and I did too. (They are still a little pissed about me and my friends building and testing a very, very small thermite bomb in the basement.)
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
I love the correlationisnotcausation tag every single time an article on any study is posted. Correlation means nothing! Nothing causes anything! There is no order in the universe! It's all chaos! :)
So does this mean we should be putting more juveniles on house arrest? It seems like the juvenile detention centers breed more crime than they prevent.
matta
Find young criminals who *have not* been caught and find out over twenty years how many crimes they committed well enough not to be caught at. Perhaps, the data might suggest, the groups studied were taught by incompetent leaders. We might be better served by studying successful criminals, who might behave differently. Or who might have been taught better work habits and techniques.
Or mebbe the youths in the study got caught "in a game" at first, but found dealing with the police, courts, other inmates, and the jail system itself emotionally satisfying in some way. This is called "institutionalisation."
Every year we pay for more and more police, and we get more and more crime.
Let's try something else. But, please, not another study like this one.
If you mix kids with too much variety in intelligence then you either teach at a level for the smart kids and leave the stupid kids behind because they can't possibly keep up or you teach at a level for the stupid kids and the smart kids get bored and quit learning.
It's much better to split kids up into classes that are suited to their strengths and weaknesses rather than be PC and stick 'em all together.
Most important is the comment that the kids exposed to the legal system, were more likely to come back to it.
Exposing children to the ugliness, simplicity, and experience of a system engenders them to it by removing the mystery, stigma, and fear associated with it. These feelings are replaced by familiarity. This is particularly true of technology as well.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
They know but they rationalize it.
"I know beating up people is wrong, but he was a huge jerk and deserved it"
"I know stealing is wrong, but Walmart has a huge amount of money and can afford the loss"
"People of $nationality/$ethnicity are really intrinsically inferior, so it's ok to treat them like crap"
"I know I committed a crime, but the harm done wasn't that great, so I shouldn't have been punished so harshly"
People rarely admit outright that they did something wrong, with no ifs or buts. There's nearly always some reason they feel that justifies it, or at least makes it not so bad.
Everything you need to know about young boys, you can learn by reading Lord of the Flies.
First, the parent is correct,
Second, education should be about equality of opportunity, not equal achievement for all, that means that the BAD and the STUPID need to be controlled, to enable that equality to the brightest and hard working.
You in the US are caught up in an orgy of political correctness and confusion which helps nobody and disadvantages all, and MUCH WORSE, it is second time around as Ms. Shirley Williams did exactly that in the UK in the late 60s and 70s (so the Educational Elite and teachers unions can not claim they dont know). And as Obama said "lipstick on a pig" is exactly like assuming you can make all children academic, which is the assumption (WRONG) of the academic elites.
In Switzerland, education is streamed, and bad behavior is punished quickly, firmly and effectively, which is very likely to get the delinquent child punished physically by their own parents. The result is that we have very little crime and antisocial behavior, well educated kids who are employable, and very low taxes because people take pride in being a "Good Swiss".
People laugh at the rediculous hi-junks in the US, where the parents (are allowed to) oppose the authorities correcting children, and except for incomers from some parts of Europe, who stand to be expelled, the native Swiss would not think of it.
The result of this is that 4 year olds can walk to kindergarten safely, and all adults expect to stand in "loco parentis" of any child in need without phobia about paedophilia, as was the case in the rural US 40 years ago.
Put very simply, you have very arrogantly lost your own way, and the rest of the world is now FULLY wised up to you.
Your court system, and law, is in a complete mess vide the games SCOX have played for so many years.