Crime and Delinquency

Schwartz, Ira M., Rendon, Jose A., and Hsieh, Chang-Ming. "Is Child Maltreatment a Leading Cause of Delinquency?" Child Welfare 73 (September 1994): 639-655.

This article is a forceful criticism of the public-policy focus on juvenile justice as the remedy for and appropriate response to delinquency and juvenile crime, by way of a criticism of the research that has been done into the issue of the causes of juvenile crime. The key argument in this regard is the fact that most public resources (i.e., tax money) aimed at solving the problem of juvenile crime have been spent on making the judicial system that must dispose punishments for the crimes more workable, efficient, and fair. To be sure, treatment of juvenile offenders, and not just punishment, appears to be a part of this. However, the position taken by this article is that the focus is on the offenders per se and not on identifying what motivates or otherwise causes the offenses in the first place.

Like Juvenile Justice, Schwartz, Rendon, and Hsieh explain dominant methods of research into juvenile cr

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ds. Many of them have learning disabilities. In adult correctional facilities between 30 and 50% of the inmates need special education" (453). According to Juvenile Justice, learning disability is connected to the failure to complete a developmental stage (91). In other words, criminal behavior can be connected to the fact that the subject somehow failed to learn accepted limits of social behavior, and so wound up a part of the justice system. Now this is where the irony kicks in. The third aspect of the article that is of note is related to the second, that so many of those same offenders attribute their incarceration, not to behavior for which they are responsible but instead to something outside themselves: "Typical inmates of a correctional institution are school dropouts. They usually have maladaptive, passive learning styles, and attribute their lack of academic success to extraindividual factors" (454). The significant pieces of information are the facts that subjects are dropouts and that the subjects blame something outside themselves for their justice-system problem. Ironically, the learning disability may be directly correlated to the dropout rate, and the so-called maladaptation can be connected partly to the fact that
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Approximate Word count = 2479
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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