Juvenile Justice, Whitehead and Lab also cite biological, psychological, and social theories that are meant to explain juvenile delinquency, although they do not specifically attribute theory clusters to specific decades. Rather, while making the point that various theories are not necessarily supported by the facts and statistics of juvenile crime and later adult behavior of juvenile criminals, Whitehead and Lab say that the most the research can say with certainty is that "at least some youthful offenders do become later delinquents and adult criminals" (187). The problem is finding a consistent and coherent theoretical explanation for the facts and figures of crime statistics. But as with Schwartz, et al., Juvenile Justice makes the point that it is difficult to identify offending youths that will become career criminals in the first place, and secondarily it is difficult to predict whether and how this will happen (Whitehead and Lab 187).
Juvenile Justice's section on identification and prediction in juvenile justice (summarized on page 207) is really a focus on method, first, and secondly (and no less significantly) a focus on how hard it is to develop methods that will result in research that is reliable in the matter of cause and effect rather than research that is distinguished mainly by the fact that it is equipped to offer only correlation of variables that may affect delinquency. This criticism is borne out in later discussions of the apparently failed attempts to deal in good faith with juvenile delinquency. Whitehead and Lab (309) trace 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 what it meant when it promoted diversion." The problem was not necessarily that diversion was a bad answer to delinquency but rather that the definitions of diversion and delinquency were not suffici...