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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.
This reminds me of the "Broken Windows" theory. (Please, don't make the OS joke that is begging to be said.) A good explanation is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixing_Broken_Windows Whatever the original root cause, of course, the effect is the same once it takes hold: The lowest common denominator often is the expression of the group as a whole. (Barring a really great leader of some sort.) This is expressed most succinctly in the following: http://despair.com/teamwork.html So bad behavior (or making poor decisions) is virus-like. The question to be answered is: can good behavior (making good decisions) also be formed to be virus-like?
I put myself through college working as a night counselor at a school for boys --- one needs to remove the perceived glamour of the ``gangsta'' lifestyle, demonstrate the consequences of poor decisions and provide the rewards of mature and responsible behaviour.
Most importantly this needs to be done regardless of the child's intellectual level --- at one meeting a fellow counselor argued that one of the students should be released because he wasn't particularly bright and was ``simply going to be a janitor when he grows up anyway'' to which another added, ``one who swipes small pilferables which won't be missed.'' --- my rejoinder was that if we kept him in the program and continued working w/ him until he successfully graduated that while he might be a janitor when he grew up, he'd be an honest one who wouldn't steal and that that was a worthwhile goal, and maybe he could be something else, but that he would never get that chance if he didn't graduate.
He stayed in the program and I actually ran into him a couple of years later --- he was just completing an apprenticeship in the building trades and had been out of trouble since graduation.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
At our small rural school, a junior one day threw a pop bottle at the car of a senior as the senior was driving away. The senior got out, roughed up the junior a little bit, and put him in his place.
But, the junior got pissed, got two of his buddies, and went over to the senior's house and vandalized the guy's car to the tune of about $1,500, plus did another $1,000 to his mother's car.
When the three stooges appeared in court, one of the three was a minor. (An accomplice, not the junior...he was 18...yea, what a shocker.) They got the minor to testify that he did all the dirty work, and the other two were just accomplices. Rather than the junior getting 90 days in jail and a $2,500 fine, he made off with just a small fine, and the minor got 40 hours of community service.
They don't just learn how to be a criminal by their friends...they are groomed.
I volunteered for a class like that. I learned many things, such as:
1) how to pick a lock
2) how to palm a beer into your sleeve
3) where to buy illegal drugs
4) classes with high female-to-male ratios are great for 3/4's of the class
5) which uppers made you lose pregnancy weight the fastest(not too useful)
6) "if you don't hate me, why haven't you had sex with me" means Run!, not Awesome!
Locking kids up because they want more attention and freedom doesn't seem to be the solution, particularly since they come out with a higher probability of worse crimes against society.
The same largely holds true for girls, it's just that girls don't tend to do the same "Delinquent" things that guys do in order to prevent becoming an outcast. Girls are less likely to cause fistfights, see how well something burns, or jump off a roof onto a trampoline. Girls are more about interacting with the people around them, rather than the world around them. As such, some of the equivalent girl activities would be doing something at odds with their 'genuine loner friend' to get into the more popular group (i.e. help the group post derogatory posters about the loner friend), be manipulative towards others (both guys and girls), and spread rumors. Since the damage that boys can cause setting fire near a shed is much easier to quantify than, say, the spread of a rumor, guys tend to get more attention from authority. That's the way I figure it anyway.
There's also money in pointless research proving what humankind has known since forever.
(1) These "obvious result" stories are often oversimplified or misreported by the media. There's often more to the study and/or conclusions than is clear from the report.
(2) Things everyone "knows" to be the case aren't always correct. Even if they're true 95% of the time, it's worth it for the other 5%. You can't base higher-level science and studies on things that "everyone knows that's true".
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