paper suggests that juvenile delinquency must be addressed individually whenever and wherever possible to ensure that this nation's youths become and remain aware of their worth to the future of this country.
II. Broken Homes and Juvenile Delinquency
In general, high crime rates, limited legitimate business activity and/or employment opportunities and poorly functioning public education systems characterize communities of the urban underclass (Coplon, 1985, p. 124). Nationally, 20 percent of all children in the United States live in families at or below the established federal poverty level (Coplon, 1985, p. 124). In many inner-city neighborhoods this figure approaches 100 percent. In many cases, families in such an environment are broken homes and, even when they are not, the home atmosphere is often negative or destructive (Coplon, 1985, p. 124). Fathers and older brothers may have police records or may beat their wives and live-in girlfriends and the children themselves may be physically or sexually abused (Coplon, 1985, p. 124). In a New Jersey study of 224 incarcerated juveniles, one out of every five reported that he had been threatened by a family member with a knife or gun and eight percent had been hurt badly enough to be hospitalized (Coplon, 1985, p. 124).
It may come as no surprise, therefore, that the typical offender today is a young male between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four (Herrnstein, 1995, p.40). In fact, age and sex are among the most predictive variables for criminal behavior. And studies have revealed that juvenile offenders are at risk of becoming adult offenders (Herrnstein, 1995, p.41). In a large Philadelphia study, participants who had been arrested as juveniles were more than four times as likely to be arrested as adults as the one who were not arrested as juveniles. Also, those who were arrested as adults were almost three times as likely to have been arrested as juveniles as the men...