Juvenile Offenders In Australia

Did you know that there are generally twice as many juvenile offenders than there are adult offenders in Australia (Australian Institute of Criminology 2015)? Juveniles are said to be more illiterate than the general population, but are there statistics to show this? Many have done research on why there is such a high rate of illiteracy in the criminal justice system, and what affects children as they begin to learn skills that are important in the development of literacy. In this essay I will be talking about what kind of proof there is that juveniles have a higher rate of illiteracy than the general population. It is important to understand why juveniles struggle with literacy in the first place, as these reasons may begin to show us ways

Poverty has been known to affect how a child may be sentenced. According to Tamar Birckhead, a little boy was shopping for presents two days before Christmas at Macy’s and was caught stealing clothes. When the officer brought the boy back for questioning with his uncle, the office explained that if they paid the store $150 there would be not charges, and it would not be reported to the police. Due to the fact that the uncle was unemployed and in debt, they were unable to pay the $150. A report was then filed, and due to financial problems the little boy and his uncle had to move, which in turn caused them to not receive a notice of court in the mail. Once he was seen in front of the judge, the little boy ended up getting community service. The final piece in this ordeal was due to lack of money in his family they didn’t have reliable transportation. Due to lack of transportation he was unable to make all of his community service hours. Missing his hours meant he had violated his contract and he was then placed on level 2 probation, which meant if one more thing went wrong, the little boy would be put into a group home for delinquents (Birckhead 2012). This story just shows that because a child had a lack of money, it caused a trickle down effect which led to him becoming a delinquent. The story proves that illiteracy is linked to poverty and poverty is linked to

According to the Australian governments research, “over 50% of a community sample of young male offenders had significant deficits on measures of figurative/abstract language” (Snow & Powell 2008). Although the research was constricted to only males, it still proves that a high percentage of male juveniles have trouble with language in general. There is not much research on the female juvenile population but one study found that 14.3% of young female offenders had a qualitative difference in their language. Meaning they had difficulties with maybe not their reading but their speech in general (Sanger, Hux, Ritzman 1999). The Australian government has done the majority of this research when it comes to literacy within juveniles. They have shown through their facts that a majority of juveniles have a lower literacy rate than the general