Juvenille Psychopaths Essays - Criminology, Crime, Psychopathy

Juvenille Psychopaths This newest phenomenon in the world of crime is perhaps the most dangerous challenge facing society and law enforcement ever. They are younger, more brutal, and completely unafraid of the law. While current research on the super predator is scarce, I will attempt to give an indication as to the reasons that a child could become just such a monster. Violent teenage criminals are increasingly vicious. Young people, often from broken homes or so-called dysfunctional families, who commit murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and other violent acts. These emotionally damaged young people, often are the products of sexual or physical abuse. They live in an aimless and violent present; have no sense of the past and no hope for the future; they commit unspeakably brutal crimes against other people, often to gratify whatever urges or desires drive them at the moment and their utter lack of remorse is shocking. (9) Studies reveal that the major cause of violent crime is not poverty but family breakdown; specifically, the absence of a father in the household. Today, right now, one-fourth of all the children in the United States are living in fatherless homes - this adds up to 19 million children without fathers. Compared to children in two parent family homes, these children will be twice as likely to drop out of school, twice as likely to have children out of wedlock, and they stand more tha n three times the chance of ending up in poverty, and almost ten times more likely to commit violent crime and ending up in jail. (1) The Heritage Foundation - a Conservative think tank - reported that the rise in violent crime over the past 30 years runs directly parallel to the rise in fatherless families. In every state in our country, according to the Heritage foundation, the rate for juvenile crime is closely linked to the percentage of children raised in single-parent families. And while it has long been thought that poverty is the primary cause of crime, the facts simply do not support this view. Teenage criminal behavior has its roots in habitual deprivation of parental love and affection going back to early infancy, according to the Heritage Foundation. A father's attention to his son has enormous positive effects on a boy's emotional and social development. But a boy abandoned by his father in deprived of a deep sense of personal security, In a well-functioning family, he continued, the very presence of the father embodies authority and this paternal authority is critical to the prevention of psychopathology and delinquency. (2 The overwhelming common factor that can be isolated in determining whether young people will be criminal in their behavior is moral poverty, Greenberg says. (3) According to the recently published Body Count: Moral Poverty . . . and How to Win America' s War Against Crime and Drugs, a new generation of super-predators, untouched by any moral inclinations, will hit America's streets in the next decade. John DiIulio, the Brookings Institute fellow who co-wrote the book with William Bennett and John Walters, calls it a multi variate phenomenon, meaning that child abuse, the high number of available high-tech guns, alcoholism and many other factors feed the problem. University of Pennsylvania professor Mavin Wolfgang says, 6 percent to 7 percent of the boys in an age group will be chronic offenders, meaning they are arrested five or more times before the age of 18. If that holds true, because there will be 500,000 more boys ages 14 to 17 in the year 2000 than there were in 1995, there will be at least 30,000 more youth criminals on the streets. The big destruction happens early, Heritage Foundation fellow Pat Fagan says. By the age of 4 or 5, the kid is really warped. Psychologists can predict by the age of 6 who'll be the super-predators. According to Fagan: Child abuses and alcohol ruins these children. John Dilulio asserts that each generation of crime-prone boys has been about three times as dangerous as the one before it. And, he argues the downhill slide into utter moral bankruptcy is about to speed up because each generation of youth criminals is growing up in more extreme conditions of moral