Violent Juvenile Crime

Controversy has long surrounded the ethical issue of violent juvenile delinquency as a social problem, and how it should be addressed. Its causes, the shape that it assumes, and the question of how to solve the problems that it creates for both offenders and their victims have vexed social theory for decades. Curiously, however, despite clinical research into the subject, there is no single agreed-upon unifying theory of social analysis or child behavior that can account for the phenomenon of crime and delinquency perpetrated by youth (Whitehead & Lab, 1990). To be sure, there is a view that "developmental arguments have proved much more useful in treatment of deviant individuals" (p. 91), which is aimed at understanding and perhaps intervening in prospective causes of violent juvenile behavior. Thus the disagreements over social theories that can explain criminal youth violence are likely to continue.

What are difficult to refute, irrespective of the causes and the theories that might explain it, are the statistics of youth crime. According to a the FBI Violent Crime Index, "person offenses"--as

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olice officials, justice, prosecutors, state probation and parole agencies, and (as needed) schools and social service agencies. (Wootton & Heck, 2002) Wootton and Heck also note that SHOPAC advocates also favor the trying as adults of offenders who commit serious violent crimes and major drug trafficking acts. Implicit, although not specifically stated in the text of Wootton and Heck, is the notion that the prospect of severe and/or adult punishment will act as a deterrent to juveniles who are on the point of committing violent crime. According to Blumstein (2002), such proposals as SHOPAC emerged in the late 1990s in response to two phenomena. The first was a spate of high-profile school shootings ranging from Colorado to Mississippi, Oregon, Kentucky, and Arkansas that occurred in that period. The second was an emerging concept fostering "public rhetoric that labeled a whole generation of youth as 'superpredators'" (p. 40). The public-policy response, as the SHOPAC proposal demonstrates, was to address the problem of youth violence in a punitive manner. To put it another way, if the implication of deterrence is not recognized by the youthful offender, then the justice system will exact a significant social price from that off
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Approximate Word count = 1947
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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