Juvenile Delinquency Chapter 7

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The greatest or best theory in chapter 7 comes from page 234-237. Terrie Moffitt, proposed the idea, and I tend to agree with him. Basically, the idea is, in short, that teens and adolescence are good. But, the good is interrupted by a short period of the child or teen engaging in delinquency. For the most part, these young people can resist the temptation and are basically law abiding. these are called adolescence-limited offenders. because of the offender type, these people may have a harder time doing more normal simple things based on the way they have been living, the book talks about getting a drivers license as one example. Even dating is mentioned, this is all effected because of the responsibility aspect being effected by the delinquent spurt. Another thing that happens here is that with the responsibility aspect, the child may begin to see the delinquent behavior as something that will help with coping, this will, in my opinion, lead to more and even worse kinds of delinquency because of the “support the child may be feeling from it. I know its only a vein of what I have been talking about but on page 136, the key term called “cumulative disadvantage” comes up. In short this idea mean that with successive misbehavior, the chances of having a life that is better goes down. All this leads to my conclusion. I think that Moffitt had a great idea here and I agree with what he said. Basically. from my younger days, I can remember gaining some “satisfaction” in doing what was wrong. I was not a bad kid but the little things like taking change or cookies gave me some sort of idea that stealing and being sneaky was a good thing, because it made me feel good, like I was better than others because I didn’t get caught. Moffitt says kind of the same thing I felt, only, with the delinquent behavior he described made the child feel more than just satisfaction. He

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