Juvenile Delinquency Development Issues, Essay Example

Esther Cepeda’s “How Children Become Criminals” released in 2011 in the Washington Post discusses the issue on what particular elements contribute to the development of conditions that lead to juvenile delinquency. This particular article presents the case of a 10 year old boy from Riverside California. The young child was reported to have murdered his father out of concern for his mother and his siblings especially when it comes to the condition that his father has been putting the family through. Apparently, his father abuses everyone else in the family, and being the eldest son, he felt the need to protect his mother and the others from such a situation.

Feeling remorse is likely not realized as much by the child as he believes that more than the crime that he has committed, he was able to give his family a favor. Notably, this condition of thinking has attributed to his being convinced that he has done nothing wrong. In this case, in the process of reforming his conditional thinking, he is expected to be trained alongside the need to control his rage as well as reasonably decide on his acts towards emotional impositions especially regarding how others react towards him.

From this case, it has been imposed by Cepeda that most juvenile delinquents develop a particular issue of dealing with their decisions due to the environment that they are brought up into. Defining such situation alongside the contribution of being compulsive decisions as they are young makes it easier for these youths to commit crimes that they somehow even view as rather justifiable. This is the reason why at the point of providing a sense of reformation for these young offenders, law enforcers as well as handling psychologists are expected to provide special attention to reconditioning their minds and their outlook in life.

Basing from the writer’s discussion of the issues, it is practically agreeable that based form the case that has been used as an example, juvenile delinquents are often regarded to have committed their offences under circumstances of unguided decisions. Unbiased as the presentation of the facts are, the article does impose that with the aid of changing the environment that the young ones live in and creating a new chance for them to take reformation, their condition of relative behavioral breakdown could still be helped with, and better yet, turned around.

References:

Cepeda, Esther. (2011). How children become criminals. Washington Post Writers Group. http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2011/may/26/how-children-become-criminals/. (Retrieved on July 2, 2012).

Howell, J.C., ed. 1995a. Guide for Implementing the Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and Chronic Juvenile Offenders. Summary. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice.