The purpose of this research is to examine links between juvenile delinquency and anger management. The plan of the research will be to set forth the state of contemporary knowledge on the subject of juvenile delinquency and the context for the presence of anger issues in the adolescent community and then to discuss the role the anger management as an intervention has played and may play in addressing the conditions of adolescent experience such that it might serve to lower the incidence of juvenile delinquency and criminality.
No account of the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency and the multiple theoretical and practical responses to it would be complete without reference to the fact that controversy surrounds many aspects of it. In his text Juvenile Justice, Whitehead cites biological, psychological, and social theories that are meant to explain juvenile delinquency, although the point is made that various theories are not necessarily supported by the facts and statistics of juvenile crime and later adult behavior of juvenile criminals. Rather, the most the research can say with certainty is that "at least some youthful offenders do become later delinquents and adult criminals" (2003, p. 187). The problem is finding a consistent and coherent theoretical explanation for the facts and figures of crime statistics. It is difficult to identify offending youths who will become career criminals in the first place, and secondarily, it is difficult to predict whether and how that will happen (Whitehead, 2003).
Whitehead observes the difficulty of developing methods of prediction, identification, and intervention as opposed to methods of notation about the correlation of variables that may affect delinquency. For example, Whitehead (pp. 305ff) traces the failure of a presidential commission on delinquency aimed at diverting young people from crime to other activities to the failure of method, specifically, failing "to delineate exactly w...