Grunwald, Lockwood, Harris, and Mennis’s (2010) examine the effects of neighborhood context on juvenile recidivism to determine if neighborhoods influence the likelihood of re-offending. Grunwald, Lockwood, Harris, and Mennis made two hypotheses. Hypothesis one was that “neighborhood indicators of social disorganization found to predict delinquency will continue to predict recidivism after controlling for individual and family contexts” (Grunwald et al. 2010, p.1069). Hypothesis two was that “individual and neighborhood predictors of juvenile recidivism will vary depending on recidivism offense type” (Grunwald et al. 2010 p.1069). For this study Grunwald and his team used data taken from the Program Development and Evaluation System database of Philadelphia Family Court. This database measured: family demographics, …show more content…
2010, p.1070). Data to measure the neighborhood level was taken from the Philadelphia Health Management Corporation (PHMC). In this study Grunwald, Lockwood, Harris, and Mennis looked at 45 neighborhoods located in one city. The sample size used was 7,061 male juvenile offenders. Out of the 7,061, 36% were on parole. Grunwald, Lockwood, Harris, and Mennis measured recidivism, individual-level predictors, neighborhood disadvantage, and social capital to see what influences juvenile recidivism. In this study Grunwald, Lockwood, Harris, and Mennis (2010) used four different juvenile recidivism outcomes to measure the rate of recidivism among juveniles. One of the outcomes measured new offenses and specific offenses relating to property, drug, or violence. When Grunwald and his team measured for recidivism
Shaw, C. R., & McKay, H. D. (1969). Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Revised ed.). University of Chicago Press.
Two major sociological theories explain youth crime at the macro level. The first is Social Disorganization theory, created in 1969 by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay. The theory resulted from a study of juvenile delinquency in Chicago using information from 1900 to 1940, which attempts to answer the question of how aspects of the structure of a community contribute to social control. The study found that a community that is unable to achieve common values has a high rate of delinquency. Shaw and McKay looked at the physical appearance of the neighborhoods, the average income of the population, the ethnicity of the neighborhood, the percent of renters versus owners, and how fast the population of the area changed. These factors all contribute to neighborhood delinquency.
Jenson, Jeffrey and Howard, Matthew. "Youth Crime, Public Policy, and Practice in the Juvenile Justice System: Recent Trends and Needed Reforms." Social Work 43 (1998): 324-32
The rehabilitation program that has proven to be effective across multiple studies is Cognitive Behavioral therapy, or CBT. The treatment targets not only the cognitive directions of the offender, but also the behaviors associated. As Lipsey, Chapman, & Landenberger (2001) reviewed, the therapy focuses on cognitive restructuring to lead the offender to have more adaptive reasoning once they are released from prison. The therapy takes place while the offender is imprisoned and works heavily to change the factors that lead to recidivism. The goal is to get the offender prepared to reenter the world and to be more pro-social than they were prior to incarceration (Landenberger & Lipsey, 2005). For the best program of CBT, the treatment works better
Aftercare programs are used often with juveniles in hopes of preventing recidivism. Recidivism is of high concern to the criminal justice system in that the safety of the public depends on low recidivism rates. Juvenile Incarceration facilities have programs set up, such as education and pro-social behavior classes, to promote bettering the juvenile’s life. However, research has shown that the progress made while incarcerated slowly declines upon release. This is testimony to the importance of aftercare programs in preventing recidivism.
Shaw and McKay (1942) specified residential mobility as a second aspect of social disorganization that influences crime rates. In the words of Kasarda and Janowitz (1974) communities operate "as a complex system of friendship and kinship networks and formal and informal associational ties rooted in family life and ongoing socialization processes.” Population turnover, or the constant influx of new residents into an area reduces opportunities to create long lasting relationships between neighborhood residents (Bursik, 1999). Fewer ongoing relationships cause social ties and social capital to be weak thus contributing to the inability to recognize common values and organize collective efforts against unwanted behaviors. Empirical tests of social disorganization find the residential mobility component also to be mixed as associated with violence rates (Hawkins, et al., 2000; Haynie & South,
In today’s society there is a lot of crime going on that involves minors and the first thing that some people do is blame parents for the misbehavior. What if the minor lives in the home with an alcoholic mom, and a drug addict father, and the minor feels as though he/she is in the world alone. The definition of a minor is “an infant or person who is under the age of legal competence”. (http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/minor) The minor starts hanging with the wrong crowd to feel wanted and decides to rob a bank, he goes to jail, and is sentenced to prison. Now there are clearly things that contributed to the way the minor committed this crime but it does not make it okay either. He was not getting any attention at home so he
As discussed in depth, there are all types of crimes that are committed by young offenders these days and the offenders possess a number of different characteristics. There have been many theoretical crime explanations that have been formed over the years that attempt to explain the reasoning behind the question of why certain individuals, both young and old, are more prone to commit crimes. The discussion of punishment practices are also important because it displays the many approaches that have been taken to ensure that juvenile delinquents are being treated fairly, but punished and rehabilitated all simultaneously. Many methods fall under this kind of approach referred to as the restorative justice approach such as neighborhood conference committees, victim impact panels, sentencing circles, and community impact panels which all attempt to rehabilitate the offender, but also to involve members of society including the victims/survivors of crimes (Siegel, 2009). It is believed and hoped with the continuation of processes, practices, and programs in place such as these that juvenile crime will eventually decrease bringing more order to our society as a whole. Overall, this paper strives to bring awareness to juvenile delinquency by
Introduction: Recidivism or, habitual relapses into crime, has time and time again proven to be an issue among delinquents, which thereby increases the overall juvenile prison population. This issue has become more prevalent than what we realize. Unless a unit for measuring a juvenile’s risk of recidivism is enacted and used to determine a system to promote effective prevention, than the juvenile prison population will continue to increase. Our court system should not only focus on punishing the said juvenile but also enforce a program or policy that will allow for prevention of recidivism. So the question remains, how can recidivism in the juvenile prison population be prevented so that it is no longer the central cause for increased juvenile delinquency? Simply put, we must create a means of measuring juvenile’s level of risk and in turn, form an effective rehabilitation program that will decrease their risk level for future recidivism.
When the Juvenile Justice System was created, it was geared towards treating poverty stricken juvenile offenders as adults while allowing the wealthier offenders to essentially go free. Decades later, a reform movement saw a need to delineate juvenile offender from adults through their own court system. A shift in how these offenders were treated throughout the juvenile system process began to take shape. There was a push to reduce the risk of a youth offender becoming an adult offender. This push is far different from how the initial juvenile offenders were treated.
Not only do neighborhoods help to influence and not deter criminal behavior they also are influenced from other sources such as family, friends, schools etc. This is the view of most sociologists that adhere to the view of differential association. These views are also somewhat flawed but are a much better predictor of criminal behavior than the latter. Differential association tends to look as criminal behavior as a learned behavior this I agree with in some aspects most behavior is learned from parents, friends and family but can also be caused from psychological factors and biological factors such as some personality disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders and genetic irregularities such as XYY super males that are more prone to suffer from anti social personality disorder or psychopathy.
Social Disorganization Theory is based upon looking for outside motivations that contribute to the acts of delinquency. Some of the connections, however, that the theory makes to the letter to the Chicago Times are the following: heterogeneity from the Social Ecological Model, Disorganized neighborhoods from the Collective Efficacy Model, and social control from the Sampson and Grove’s Model. The letter explains youth want more protection and better relationships with police and community. The Social Ecological Model says, “differences among people living in a given area, there is a lack of shared norms” (Bates and Swan 2014:122). Without heterogeneity (relationship between individuals/ social groups) in a mutual agreement of wanting a
So much of who a child is, is their mindset. A child’s belief in his or her own capabilities is a powerful influence on his or her development and achievement. This is unfortunate for juvenile delinquents in America, because their beliefs cannot be altered even if they participate in a Juvenile Awareness program such as Scared Straight.
Social disorganization can be seen as origin of the development of criminal behaviors and that criminal behavior, “is linked to environmental conditions that fail to provide residents with proper human relations and development.”(182) The development of a situation like this is quite simple, a City would be segregated into two sections, a neighborhood for the wealthy and a neighborhood for the poor. People that are living in the poverty stricken area are, “controlled by the social and ecological climate.” Meaning that since these poverty stricken neighborhood have a higher crime rate, people living in these areas are likely to be influenced by their neighborhoods culture. This then results in a even higher crime rate and soon lose social control of the neighborhood. People who live in a disorganized neighborhood most likely want to try to get out of the area and will not invest into the community. This results in dirty streets and unmaintained homes. This is the reason why The Chicago School sociologists believes that “neighborhood conditions, and not individual pathology were the key influence on behavior.”
Brutal, harsh, unforgiving, and relentless . . . the worst effect of poverty is not a tangible dirtiness, but a corruption of one’s very soul. Juvenile delinquency has always been a huge problem, but it has been especially evident in recent years as the juvenile crime rate increased exponentially to more than 1.3 million delinquency cases in just 2010. In 1999, the American public ranked crime as the most important problem facing the nation("Juveniles"). In 1994 there were only 78 youth court programs in operation, whereas in 2010 there were over 1,050 youth courts in operation ("Youth Courts"). The causes of juvenile delinquency are both economic and social. Some specific examples of these factors are bad housing, broken homes, parental negligence, boy and girl gangs, and other harsh neighborhood conditions. While social influences undeniably contribute to juvenile delinquency, it is the economic circumstances that contribute most to continued delinquent behavior amongst juveniles who are in consistent trouble with the law. Current solutions are either skill-based without appropriate support or highly punitive in nature; available resources would be better spent addressing the fundamental economic disparity of communities which primarily causes most of these problems.