I believe the most crucial topic in criminal justice, is crime prevention. Crime prevention is a very broad topic so my emphasis and main focus will be on crime prevention pertaining to youth. Juvenile Delinquency is any case involving a minor charged with an act that would be a crime if committed by an adult. Juvenile delinquency is a serious problem with today’s youth. Statistics reveal that persons under the age of 18 accounted for approximately 15.4% of all arrests in the United States in 2007 (FBI, 1996-2007, 2008). I do not believe people are born criminals, but that they become criminals based on life experiences and their individual upbringing. Throughout this blog, I will be looking at several issues in depth: juvenile delinquency, juvenile recidivism, risk factors, gender roles, pathways to delinquency, and prevention. To date there are no universal programs available that prevent all juveniles from committing crimes. As a person with the ability to make choices of our own, it is impossible to deter all youth from committing crime. For instance, a program that worked on a child who suffered from physical abuse might not work for a child who suffered from sexual abuse. But, with this being said, not all people who were victims of abuse end up repeating the abuse and/or getting into trouble with the law. I will be exploring the different programs, ideas, and theories used to prevent youths from committing crimes. I intend to analyze and research this topic, not just to determine what does and does not work, but to discover what makes a youth intervention program successful.
This topic is important because it affects society as a whole. Crime and society go hand-in-hand, therefore, as long as we have a society there will always be crime. Although we cannot stop all crime, we can however lower the overall rate of crime depending on our prevention and response to it. Society’s current response to dealing with crime is to react to it. In today’s system, police make an arrest and take the criminals off the street. The criminals then go to court and finally to the correctional system, where we lock them up, away from society. This is a very costly and reactive approach to solving our problem with crime. We need to be proactive in our approach and direct our efforts towards the prevention of crime thereby lowering the rate of crime and criminals. Various cost-benefit analyses show that early prevention programs provide value for money and can be a worthwhile investment of government resources compared with prison and other criminal justice responses (Welsh and Farrington 871). Putting a quick patch on a leak may temporarily fix the problem but eventually you are going to have to fix the actual problem. It’s time for us to stop reacting to crime and think of how to prevent it from occurring. Due to our current crime solution our jails and prisons throughout the nation are experiencing overcrowding. We currently have more criminals than we have cells. Crime prevention will not change our present day problems with crime, but in ten to twenty years from now society will ultimately be a better place due to crime prevention. Stepping back and looking at the bigger picture by helping today’s youth and preventing them from committing crimes is not only benefiting them, but also benefiting our society.
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (1996-2007) Crime in the United States, 1995-2006. Retrieved from http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm
Welsh, Brandon C., and David P. Farrington. “Save Children From a Life of Crime.” Criminology & Public Policy 6.4 (2007): 871-79. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 9 Nov. 2009.
