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Study Finds Delinquent Behavior Among Boys Is "Contagious"

Posted by samzenpus on from the if-you-lie-down-with-dogs-you-will-get-up-with-fleas dept.

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.

3 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Create a Positive Peer Culture by WillAdams · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. A good example of this... by Pollux · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Don't force your kid to share ... by XMLsucks · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Child behavior is often successfully explained (but not always) by how much loving attention a child gets from its role models, and by how much freedom the child gets in pursuing its desires (e.g., if she wants to play with Barbie, then you hurt her confidence by forbidding it, and ultimately lead her to vanity, the very opposite you wanted to achieve by forbidding Barbie). A child is often a delinquent due to insufficient loving attention, or severe repression (and well-meaning parents do a lot of repression, e.g., forcing a child to share when it clearly doesn't want to, or participating in religion). The delinquent behavior of the child is a symbolic cry for loving attention / freedom, which is completely ironic, because we all view it as the child being bad and incurable, but not crying for life. The typical societal response is to punish them in a way to make it even worse: reduce what little loving attention they had even further by locking them up, and telling them that they are bad, which they inherently won't believe. The end result is anger towards society for depriving the child of the freedom and attention that he wanted, which manifests as retaliation against society --- further crime.

    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.