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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.
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.
Most people don't think they're doing something wrong. They just were hanging out with their friends, or having fun, and don't deserve getting dragged through the courts for it. The ones who prosecuted them are just a bunch of jerks, and if they don't respect me why should I respect them?
Another possible factor is that when this happens once, the people involved probably start getting watched more and treated with more suspicion. If people are watching you more, you're more likely to get caught. And if everybody assumes you're going to steal, some people come to the conclusion they might as well go and do that, since they're being assumed to anyway.
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.
There's an old saying which says "birds of a feather fly together." (Or, "You can tell a man by the company he keeps.") This study implies that the behavior is being shaped by peers, instead of people associating with others who have similar behavior. This is somewhat obvious, but it doesn't seem as dumb as some people are making it out to be.
"Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad." [Ecclesiastes 7:3]
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.
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?
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.
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.
Hey Slashdot, can we have a "Science Firmly Established in Every Last Detail" section for the correlation is not causation people?
By the way, it's correation =/> causation. There's a difference. A big one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
New series on BBC which seems apropos: on iPlayer