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The Invisible Delinquent
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16964 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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4 / 1990 |
3,996 Words |
| Author
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Timothy D. Crowe
Timothy D. Crowe is the former director of the National Crime
Prevention Institute at the University of Louisville. He is a
lecturer and consultant on criminology for public and private
organizations including schools and federal and state
departments. His latest publication is Crime Prevention
through Environmental Design (Butterworth). |
For many young people in our society, a brush with the law is a symptom of "growing pains." National statistics indicate that approximately 35 percent of all boys and 11 percent of all girls will be arrested at least once. For nearly all of these juveniles, this wrongdoing is a youthful aberration. Their personalities and sense of responsibility continue to mature, and they develop, eventually, into law-abiding adults.
However, a small percentage will not reform or get back on track: They will continue with a life of criminal behavior. These youths are referred to as serious habitual offenders (SHO) and, though they make up a minuscule proportion of the population of a given community, they account for a shocking percentage of the crimes committed throughout the nation. The following is a description of a typical serious habitual offender:
“The Serious Habitual Offender (SHO) is fifteen years and ten months old; has been arrested fourteen times (first arrest at nine). By the time fourteen years old, 95 percent of them have used both alcohol and marijuana. Ninety percent admit to chronic criminal activity and committing ten crimes for every one crime that they have been arrested for. The SHO comes from a dysfunctional family setting where there is a lack of discipline or family structure. Role models are weak or negative, and there exists little or no emotional family support. Over 85 percent of the SHOs have suffered from emotional, physical, or sexual abuse. Forty percent of the SHOs have a reported runaway history. Over the last year the SHO has been arrested five times, two of those times for a felony. Two out of every one hundred SHOs have killed or will kill. There are from twenty-five to thirty-five juveniles per one hundred thousand people who fit the SHO definition. The SHOs can account for as much as 42 percent of the serious juvenile crime in a community, and 11 percent or all crime in that community.”
Many of these youths will go on to commit a violent crime, yet regardless of the seriousness of the crime, the only formal declaration of a juvenile's guilt for his wrongdoing is via adjudication in a juvenile court; that is, a decision by a judge that he or she is delinquent by virtue of his misdemeanor or felony. The vast majority of juvenile cases never reach this level. Some youths have committed as many as fourteen crimes but have never been adjudicated, and thus their records do not indicate their guilt. (In some jurisdictions, this reluctance to call the juvenile criminal "guilty" is reflected in a euphemistic ruling by the judge that the youth is, instead, "not
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