Gang Violence and Juvenile Delinquency Research Paper

Gang Violence and Juvenile Delinquency - Research Paper Example According to the Finley (2007), cultural and social landscape has varied significantly since the establishment of the juvenile system in the early 1990s. In essence, gangs, drugs and easy accessibility to deadly weapons have contributed majorly to the increasing number of juvenile crimes including murder which currently has reached an alarming rate. They further claim that juvenile court system has insufficient resources to handle amicably the problems brought by amoral teenagers and children in the society. Rosenheim (2002) explains that the perceived clemency associated with the juvenile justice system as prescribed by the juvenile laws insinuate that it is not within the context of law for the juvenile court judge to warrant any form of punishment for the young criminal but to issue rehabilitation assistance to the juvenile. This has highly contributed to the juvenile system lack of capacity of correcting the amoral behavior fostered by the young but violent children. The system b ased on the current situation juvenile law stimulates a rotating-door course that leads the message that juvenile criminals are not held responsible for their wrong doings and not until these offenders are subjected to adults criminal courts that when they experience punishment for the first time in their lives. Based on my analysis, the law should be revised to allow for the punishing of the juveniles criminals in the first instance as this would prevent future amoral activities when the juvenile offender shall have grown into adult. In addition, accordance with the juvenile law, it is prohibited to release the juvenile criminal perpetrators from the authority of the juvenile court at an age above eighteen years. Serving less years in juvenile jail for an offense which would have earned an adult ten or more years sentence is unjust. For effective operation and success of this system, punishment for the misconduct should be the same irrespective of the age of the offender (Whitehead and Steven, 2006). Owing to these inadequacies and problems associated with juvenile laws, many critics have proposed for its complete overhaul or amendment of some of its laws, failure of which the crime rate among the young perpetrators would continue to escalate in the society. According to Scott and Steinberg (2008) some of these mitigation measures are juveniles should have complete DUEPROCESS rights such as right to trial by jury in the same way adult criminals are tried, freedom from the rehabilitation ideology associated with the juvenile system, allowing the juvenile to be tried to court once the young perpetrators are convicted and letting the juveniles to be accountable for their amoral actions. Theories of Delinquency Causation According to Banduras social theory, people acquire knowledge via observing others’ attitudes, behavior and results of those behaviors. Based on this theory, majority of human conduct is learned through observation and modeling. This infer s that through observing how others conduct themselves, one comes up with the idea of how newly acquired behaviors are carried out and eventually this explicit information works as a blueprint