Juvenile delinquent is any underage person that is a person who has not attained the age of reason and is believed to have been involved in any criminal activity. These criminal activities are activities that the law terms as illegal. The juvenile lacks the responsibility and therefore they are not judged as an adult. In an attempt to address this situation, many states have reduced the age of being responsible for one’s crimes for crimes that seems serious or for the youths who repeat the same crime to an age of fourteen years (Farrell, 2005).
The definition of the juvenile deliquency varies largely among states with some states taking it from fourteen years and others at twenty one years. The age bracket between sixteen and twenty years is mostly considered as a transition from childhood to adulthood is mostly characterised by so many incidences of serious crimes. Many criminal activities that are carried out by adults today are known to have their backgrounds in the early delinquency. The most common form of offense done by children is theft with most series crimes like rape and other serious crimes are later seen in the later days of the youth. The triggering factors of these childhood crimes owes to the complexity of the social, psychological and economic factors.
Clinical studies have attributed emotional maladjustment, as a base of the childhood crimes. Some other studies have seen that these crimes mostly dominate in the poor backgrounds. In the inner cities, gangs of youth are where criminal ideas develop. In order to address the issue of juvenile delinquency, informal processes and ways of correcting should be used as opposed to punishing the parties involved. Psychiatric clinics have been known to address these issues correctly and also public welfare agencies outside the courtroom. Juvenile correction and rehabilitation centres have been setup and separated from prisons where the youths have access to rehabilitation programs, are provided with vocational training, and psychiatric treatment is offered. Foster homes, parole systems, public youths protective agencies have also played a chief role in correcting both maladjusted and Deliquent children.
It therefore remain clear that if juvenile delinquency is not addressed in a timely manner it is seen to cause so many complex criminal activities that even the state may not be able to deal with. It is also notable that juvenile delinquency is at the peak in the countries that are more advanced both economically and technologically (Berkoff, 2010).
References
Berkoff, S. (2010, November 5). Diary of a Juvenile Delinquent. Juvenile Delinquent , p. 54.
Farrell, V. (2005). The Juvenile Delinquent: Fiction based on a true story. New york: iUniverse, Inc.
