Kids Gone Bad: An Overview of Juvenile Crime

The United States executes more juvenile offenders than any other country in the world. Out of the nineteen child offenders that have been put to death in the past five years, thirteen of them were in the U.S., eight in Texas alone. They had been on death row anywhere from two years to over twenty. The United States and Somalia are the only two countries that have not ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Children, which bars child executions, and in fact, the U.S. is one of only a handful of nations that still practice the death penalty for adults. The majority of other countries have stopped putting people to death either through the passing of laws or just by not following the practice anymore. Is it really necessary to put juvenile offenders to death and why are Americans so eager to do so? Unfortunately, these are questions to which there are no easy answers, and that is not really what this paper is about, it's just something to ponder.

Juvenile crime has many different causes and just as many methods of prevention and punishment, some effective, some not. As a teenager, I personally was not involved in the juvenile court system, but since my brother was, I spent a lot of time either in court rooms or visiting detention centers. He spent many months in various juvenile detention centers, and finally as an adult, was sent to prison for seven years on drug related charges. If he had been given the proper support and rehabilitation efforts as a young offender, and had the judges tried to find out exactly why he was a repeat offender, things may have turned out much differently for him. If we take kids who commit property crimes and slap their wrists and send them home, have they really learned anything? What if the reason they are out making mischief is that their parents are not at home and they have no supervision? What if their parents simply don't care where they are or what they are doing? Is it really the kids fault? I think an important point that should be made is that the term juvenile offender typically refers to a person that is seventeen years or younger at the time they commit their crimes. I feel that when handing down a sentence in a juvenile offence case, the reasons for the offence and the age of the offender need to be taken into account, and every effort should be made to rehabilitate the juvenile.

In the paper "Should Juvenile Offenders Be Tried as Adults?", Laurence Steinberg puts forth his opinion on how a juvenile should be defined. Steinberg believes that instead of the two standard categories in common use right now, juvenile and adult, there should actually be three categories into which we place offenders. Juveniles would be defined as those under the age of thirteen, no matter what they have done, youths would be persons between fourteen and sixteen and adults would then be anyone aged seventeen years and older (8).

Steinberg feels it is important to redefine these terms because as it is right now, there is no set national standard for the age at which one can be tried as an adult. In New York, for example, the jurisdiction of the juvenile court ends at age fifteen, however, developmentally, a sixteen year old may not be capable of thinking the same way as an adult, and Steinberg feels that if one is going to claim that the age of an offender is important, it is equally important to determine how and at what point age should become a factor because the sixteen year old brain is still not fully formed and this immaturity does hamper decision-making ability (2, 3).

There are factors other than just immature brains that can lead a child to become a juvenile offender, and some children just seem to be more at risk than others. Not surprisingly, males are slightly more at risk than females of becoming violent offenders, however, research shows that children of both genders suffering from certain learning difficulties, low IQ and poor impulse control are more at risk for becoming offenders, and it is no surprise that these factors often occur together (APA Briefing Paper, 5). In addition to brain abnormalities, violent television programs and movies, and now in our digital age, computer games contribute much toward the development of risk factors in at-risk kids. Children see violent acts carried out practically every day, but almost never are they shown the repercussions of the violence. Children are not being taught that their actions have consequences. This is due in part to a lack of parental involvement in children's lives. Many kids are shuffled off to day care before school, and after school older kids are often left unattended because both parents have to work in order to survive. An older study whose research is still valid shows that a lack of parental involvement, abusive homes, poverty, and having more than four children in a family are also major risk factors (Andrew, 136-138).

There are also risk factors that one would possibly never consider to have a role in juvenile crime. Two factors that could be perhaps the most surprising for the majority of people, politicians and the media, have been stirring up trouble for several years. During the early 1990's, there was in increase in the amount of juvenile crime, and the politicians hoped to gain votes by playing up this aspect in their campaigns. The media caught on to this and added fuel to the juvenile crime frenzy started by the politicians (Strauss, AlterNet). In addition to the vote-hungry politicians, there is another, perhaps more serious risk factor in juvenile crime that was discovered by accident in a study conducted at a juvenile detention center in Britain, malnutrition. Researchers received permission to give a female offender daily vitamin supplements. Her behavior improved almost immediately, so now curious, the researchers tried the experiment on a larger scale and attained similar results, with prisoners receiving the supplements committing thirty-seven percent fewer offenses than those who received a placebo. This research seems to suggest "…that a daily dose of vitamins, minerals and fatty acids could stem the tidal wave of crime that threatens to swamp the prison system, and perhaps society at large" (Peplow, 38).

Even with so many things working against the youth of this country, it is possible for adults to help kids to not fall prey to the criminal way of life. There are some common sense things that can be done, such as monitoring what TV shows and movies children watch, taking an active role in their lives and trying to instill a sense of guilt while teaching them right from wrong, and teaching kids that every one of their actions has consequences (Johnson, 12). These actions do seem to work best while a child is still young, but they can also be effective for older kids, too. To combat some of the more uncommon risk factors, parents and schools need to ensure that kids receive good nutrition, daily vitamin supplements if necessary, and provide kids with an environment that they can feel safe and positive about. Feeling a sense of trust, common values and belonging in their neighborhoods can decrease the incidents of juvenile crime, as can the simple act of adults being willing to get involved (Bagnall, A-19).

With all the disturbing truths, there are some myths about juvenile offenders. One of the more common myths floating around is that the majority of juvenile offenders are black. This is simply not true. In the United States in 1998, while there was a disproportionately high number of black juvenile offenders given the overall percentage of black juveniles in the population, white juveniles outnumbered all other races in every category of juvenile crime (OJJDP, 8). Typically when one thinks of a juvenile offender, one pictures a male. While it is true that males are over all more likely to offend, in 1999, drug use was the only category where males outscored females. The number of female offenders has increased in every area over the past ten years. As of 1999, the number of female juvenile offenders in person cases was twenty-six percent, while male offenders lagged slightly behind with twenty-two percent (Juvenile Court Statistics, 12).

Now that some of the causes of juvenile crime have been examined, let's look at just how many crimes are committed by juveniles in the United States and what kinds of punishments are typically handed down. In 1999, the Juvenile courts of the U.S. handled over 1,673,000 cases (NCJJ, 6). Obviously, all of these kids were not put on death row, and the majority of them were never even put in jail. These figures represent a decrease in juvenile crime overall. However, while the overall number of juvenile offenders dropped, the number of cases that resulted in detention at any point rose by over thirty-three thousand between 1990 and 1999, and not surprisingly, black juveniles are more likely to be detained than white juveniles, no matter what their crime (Harms, 1).

With the numbers of crimes committed, it naturally follows that there should be repercussions. The highest Missouri court recently voted that executing juvenile offenders was unconstitutional, and no longer enforces the death penalty for those under seventeen years of age at the time of their crimes (Waldmeir, 3). In opposition to the state of Missouri and the other thirty-seven states that do not execute juvenile offenders, there are currently seventy-three men, juveniles at both the time of their crimes and the time of their sentencing, sitting on death row in twelve states. The majority of sentences handed down by the juvenile courts in Missouri focus on rehabilitation and restitution in the hopes of preventing future crime rather than being strictly focused on punishment. Most youth are sentenced by the juvenile court to pay restitution out of their own pockets when appropriate, serve probation and perform community service. The court system reserves the right to transfer to the adult courts those juveniles who commit any of the acts that have come to be known by some as the seven deadly sins: "…murder, first degree assault, forcible rape, forcible sodomy, first degree robbery, distribution of drugs or two or more unrelated felonies" (Mooney, Jackson County Family Court).

Having looked at some of the ways juvenile crimes are handled in the United States, it is important to briefly examine juvenile crime in other countries. In this country's northern neighbor, Canada, there was an increase in juvenile crime similar to the one experienced by the U.S in the early 1990's, and a similar decrease in crime rates since that time. About five years ago, many Canadians seemed to feel that the sentencing was not strict enough for juvenile offenders, and this public opinion helped to lead to the amending of the Young Offenders Act in 1995, and the passing of the Youth Criminal Justice Act in April 2003. The YCJA was designed to make the young person be accountable for their actions, and strongly encourages non-court measures for lesser crimes (Statistics Canada). Also similar to the United States, the majority of the youth crimes in Canada were the less serious, non-violent crimes. On the other side of the pond, the United Kingdom also experiences juvenile crimes, with property crimes such as theft, burglary, fraud and forgery accounting for at least two-thirds of them. Though the UK has experienced a twenty-one percent drop in the number of juvenile crimes in the last ten years, like here in the U.S., prison sentences for young offenders increased as much as ninety percent during a similar time frame (crimeinfo.org.uk, Youth Crime). As with the U.S. and Canada, the UK seems to focus more on the rehabilitation and prevention efforts rather than focusing strictly on punishment. Many young offenders are subject to house arrest, community service and probation, and often must pay restitution (crimeinfo.org.uk, Alternatives to custody). In both the UK and Canada, it is necessary to point out that there is no death penalty, and there have been instances where Canadian officials refused to return criminals to the U.S. without a guarantee that they would not be executed.

I think that it says a lot about the state of our world when other countries refuse to hand over criminals to us unless they are guaranteed that the criminal will remain alive, including Osama Bin Laden. Countries are not allowed to join the European Union if they still allow the death penalty. In most other countries, the death penalty is considered barbaric and horrific, and the death penalty for juveniles is looked upon as cruel and unusual punishment. This country is looked down on for its practice of the death penalty and to me, it does seem wrong somehow to sentence a fifteen or sixteen year old to die. I really think that as many prevention and rehabilitation measures as possible should be tried before sentencing a child to death. I realize that the line has to be drawn somewhere, especially for repeat offenders, but maybe life in prison would be an alternative worth looking into. It is an expensive option, with a cost of approximately twenty-four thousand dollars per inmate per year, but in an effort to drag our country into the twenty-first century, maybe it is worth looking into.