CJS/240 July 16, 2012 Asharani Moore Typically the majority of juveniles are unaware of the laws that follow when juveniles commit offenses. However the threat punishment does deter juvenile delinquency because most youths do not want to be punished for their actions. Enforcing harsher punishments upon juveniles will not prevent or decrease juveniles from further behavior. Instead increasing the availability of police and probation officers could provide juveniles with one-one-one assistance to focus more on rehabilitation rather than punishment. The general ideal of the deterrence method suggest that one punishment is enough to deter other people if the situation is take care of quickly enough.
Assess the usefulness of functionalist approaches in explaining crime The functionalist approach to analysing deviance and the causes of crime looks at society as a whole. It explains crime that the source of criminal behaviour lies in the nature of society itself rather than in psychology or biology. Functionalists such as Durkheim see deviance as an inevitable and necessary part of society and too little is unhealthy. Some also consider crime to have positive aspects for society. In this essay we will assess the usefulness of these functionalist theories, and look at how it helps us explain crime.
* Critics note that not every young person acts the same. In reverse effect some may shy away from the new status/label Cultural criminology: phenomenological in nature because of its emphasis on social phenomenon. It is not based on traditional approach; it explores the multiplicity of factors that are interactive with deviant behavior. Wants to articulate. Cultural criminology considers crime as a matter of social construction that a reality itself.
These statistics reflect the “tough on crime” policy being imposed in the United States. The lawmakers who enacted laws designed to make it easier for juveniles to be tried and punished as adults see that the only solution to juvenile crime is to detain more children to make the society safer. It
I think it is clear that young people are not deterred from bad behavior by just the fear of punishment. Kids know then a person's “bark is bigger than their bite.” At the same time,if a young person sees someone else get punished for problem behavior, this might deter them by proxy. The idea of general deterrence is that just one punishment is enough todeter other people if the situation is taken care of quickly enough. General deterrencerelies on the idea that, if young people believe that society both intends to punish criminalacts and that they are able to, they will be deterred from committing a crime by thesefactors and this awareness. One example of this is that more police officers can go onto the police force, so that the young person sees them everywhere and believes that they mightcatch them.
Juvenile justice can be defined as the sector of the law applicable to persons not of legal age. Complying with the United Nations Conventions of the Rights of the Child, the juvenile justice system aims to combine the welfare and justice approaches to youth crime, in order to keep the best interests of the child as the most prominent of priorities. However, there remains a considerable list of aims to be addressed when the issue of responding to juvenile justice arises. These include decreasing rates of recidivism, providing rehabilitation into society, and ultimately recognizing that due to mental immaturity and lack of legal knowledge, young offenders require a degree of protection. The extent to which our legal system is able to adequately provide this is at times, questionable.
Differential associations do however provide an excellent basis and starting point to work from when doing individualistic case studies and work even better as an aid for police, detectives, and other government officials in their search to pinpoint future crimes with suspicion to a specific individual. Criminal acts occur for a wide variety of reasons, most of them spontaneous and unplanned and if social learning theory is to be applied, that would assume a discernible type of sociological algorithm, which cancels out the inartistic nature of everyday crime. In the case of gang crime though, it is clear the social learning theory is applicable, but perhaps not to individualistic, spontaneous crime. Social learning theory and differential association have proven to be empirically supported and are further emerging as one of the most efficient ways of determining new and better ways to approach contemporary crime over generations. More widely used by criminologists every day, social learning theories can be used to bring forth proven methods of rehabilitation and correctional treatments now that criminology myths and misrepresentative data is beginning to be disproven.
The purpose of this paper is to exhibit the major factors of punishing juvenile offenders and the outcome these punishments produce. It is apparent that juvenile crime is a prevalent problem in the United States in which society should not disregard. On the contrary, the dilemma needs to be dealt with in a civilized manner that is in harmony with the universal standards of justice. There is a highly controversial debate regarding juvenile crime and the punishments allocated to the young offenders. However, when a child engages in criminal activity the degree of the sentence received should coincide with offense .The central emphasis of this content is to illustrate the effects of retribution by holding the juvenile justice system responsible for precisely applying the appropriate sanctions toward deserving individuals.
That usually means reverting to street crimes. These crimes include burglary, vandalism, and selling drugs. Those individuals feel that street crime is the only way they will obtain material success. Merton's theory may stand true when comparing social status with street crime; however, his theory becomes weak when the crimes include white-collar and business crimes. Therefore, Merton's theory has become an “anomie theory”.
Despite this, Positivists see official crime statistics as a reliable indicator of crime patterns. Positivists seek the causes of crime and over time can compare social groups and look for patterns in crime. The groups that are most likely to be convicted are young males, some ethnic minorities, inner city dwellers and working class. As not all crime is reported however, the statistics do not give a true picture. (Hallam et al.