Sociological Affects of Child Abuse on Victims:

The United States has been incarcerating child offenders for a couple hundred years without any indication that it benefits children or society. Currently, there are approximately 54,000 juvenile offenders in youth-detention facilities across the nation. Of those kids, in an average year, 17,800 have not even been sentenced. According to the Campaign for Youth Justice, they are just awaiting their turn in court. What’s more, another 200,000 youth is tried, sentenced, or incarcerated as adults every year.

Society mainly refuses to allow juvenile offenders a second chance and don’t treat them as youngsters, but as adults. Some don’t care about how much these offenders have left ahead of them and because of this, they don’t think the juveniles need access to rehabilitation or education programs. Through campaigns, people are convincing legislatives to change the laws to make the sentencing not as harsh and to allow them a second chance through rehabilitation and educational programs. The Sentencing Project is a non-profit organization that keeps track of crime rates and the sentencing of individuals, daily. Josh Rovner, a Juvenile Justice Advocacy Associate at The Sentencing Project, in his article “Juvenile Life Without Parole: An Overview” emphasizes that “Most of

A surprisingly large majority of young offenders outgrow crime. According to Gail Garinger, a Massachusetts juvenile court judge, “it is impossible at the time of sentencing for mental health professionals to predict which youngsters will fall within that majority and grow up to be productive, law-abiding citizens and which fall into the small minority that continue to commit crimes” (94). Everyone is bound to make poor decisions in their lives. More than the other there are just good people making bad choices. Children should be given the opportunity to demonstrate that they can mature and rehabilitate. They deserve a chance to prove that they can become different people. The best time to decide if someone is deserving of spending most to all of their life in prison is not when they are a child. If placed in juvenile correction systems, teens can be given the support and needed help to change their ways and prove that they will not always be the immature criminal they once

There is a direct relationship between juveniles that are convicted and held in adult prisons and the depression it inflicts, creating a poisonous cycle of crime that they will be unable to escape from. After an increase of murders committed by juveniles during the early 1980s and throughout the 1990s, a quick adjustment was made by the supreme court and state courts to increase the abilities of the law to condemn violent juveniles with bleak futures into adult prisons to protect the children who had more optimistic chances. While the protection of the less violent children is important, however, there has been a great many studies that prove it is not the wisest way of seeing the situation at large. Juveniles in prisons designed for their age groups create a sense of value to them as human beings, are generally safer, and are more focused on rehabilitation into society as young adults. Sentencing a juvenile to an adult prison leads to feelings of worthlessness, depression, alienation and a fearful environment where they are unsafe and more likely to be encouraged to further their crime abilities to survive in an adult world.

The current juvenile justice system “has shifted away from protecting and reforming children to "protecting" society from young people prematurely deemed incapable of rehabilitation” (Aron & Hurley, 1998). Juvenile justice is a social issue that I feel strongly toward. I do not agree that sentencing adolescents to serve time in adult correctional facilities is a reasonable solution to alter behavior, especially for non-violent offenders. However, “for each of the past five years, roughly 100,000 juveniles have been held in adult jails and prisons” (Abdelkader, 2013). “The overwhelming majority of incarcerated youth are held for nonviolent offenses” (The Annie E. Casey Foundation).

Incarceration of minors in adult prisons has been found to have low rehabilitative potential and as such results in increased engagement in criminal activities (Aizer & Doyle, 2015). Many juvenile offenders have been found to hail from particularly disadvantaged families. In addition, a significant number have a history of drug abuse. Actually, 40-70% of the young offenders have a history of substance abuse and dependence (Aizer & Doyle, 2015). Apart from drug abuse, some of these offenders may have a history of mistreatment and even psychiatric disorders.

Killers, rapists, and other criminals are being released every day, after serving a very short, or easy sentence. Who are these criminals, and what is the reasoning for this type of treatment? These criminals are juveniles who have committed violent crimes. On a daily basis in the juvenile justice system, kids are being tried and being given short sentences, or are even being set free with a penalty as minor as house arrest. Meanwhile, their victims and the victims families, are left to suffer because of the decision of a kid. The belief that a second chance should be given to a youth who commits crimes, is why criminals are walking among us, living as our neighbors, and in many most cases committing additional crimes. Despite the fact that since 1994, the arrest rates for juveniles have plummeted by forty-seven percent, criminal statistics for children of seventeen and below are still extremely high. Juvenile crime statistics report that every year, juvenile courts in the U.S. handle an estimated 1.7 million cases, in which the youth was charged with a delinquency offense, or in other words, approximately 4,600 delinquency cases per day. The major issue with the amount of crime, when it comes to juveniles, has not been dealt with the way that it should be; with further actions being taken, and an increase in strictness in sentences.

Juvenile justice laws have changed with conservative motions and with the general ongoing swinging pendulum between rehabilitation and incarceration. During the 1990’s the pendulum swung to the right towards tough-on-crime initiatives due to an increase of violent crimes by juveniles and seemingly failed rehabilitative efforts due to high rates of recidivism. State legislatures across the country enacted statutes under which growing numbers of youths can be prosecuted in criminal courts and sentenced to prison (Piquero & Steinberg, 2007). As of 1992, “the number of youth under 18 confined in adult prisons ha[d] more than doubled during the decade prior” (USDOJ, 2000, p.4). At the time of their 2007 publication, Piquero and Steinberg reported

A Social Issue is where a whole society or a group of people within the society by affected by a specific problem which usually take a large number of people within the society to rectify or solve the problem at hand.

Those who make and influence policy are eager to know “more about what happens to youth after they have been in contact with the juvenile justice system. What are their rearrest and reincarceration rates? How do they fare in terms of education, employment, and other important outcome measures while they are under juvenile justice supervision and afterward?”(p.1). Sullivan points out that society’s “tough on crime mentality” is the precursor to trying youth as adults. Incarcerating them in adult prisons only increases their chances to offend and become repeat offenders. (p.9) “Being in adult facilities alone does not just increase the chance for being a recidivist. Simply the act of criminal court processing, even without a criminal sentencing,

The number of juvenile offenders tried and housed as adults are astounding. The risks associated with the housing of juvenile offenders in adult facilities should be an adequate reasoning for not doing so. The risks of both sexual assault, as well as other forms of physical assault, are greatly increased in these instances (Elrod & Ryder, 2014). The lack of educational programs within the institutions creates a great obstacle for juvenile offenders. They are released with little to no skills to allow them to become a productive member of society ultimately creating a cycle that will most likely land them back in a penal facility later in life. The use of community-based programs has shown to have a greater impact on the outcome of

Juvenile offending is a concern in society today. Juveniles account for approximately 19% of the population but are responsible for 29% of criminal arrests (Cottle, Lee, & Heilbrun, 2001). Crime overall has been found to be decreasing throughout the last two decades. The issue is that the rate in which adult crime is decreasing is significantly greater than the rate in which juvenile crime is decreasing. Since the rate of juvenile crime is so high, juvenile delinquents are seen as predators and many believe they lack morals. The way in which media of today’s society constructs juvenile delinquency impacts the views of a community towards their youth and youth offenders. Media presents an inaccurate image of youth offenders as violent predators (Rhineberger-Dunn, 2013). This inaccurate image significantly promotes the myths that juvenile crime is rising, juveniles commit crimes that are primarily violent, and that juveniles are highly effected by recidivism and continue committing crimes into adulthood (Bohm, & Walker, 2013). It has already been stated though that crime rates have been decreasing over the last two decades so the first myth is refuted. The myth that juveniles primarily commit violent crimes is also very off. In most cases, juveniles are involved in property crimes and although there are some violent crime cases, they are very rare. When these rare violent crimes do occur, youth can be tried in adult court. The

It is common for parents and their children to have disagreements and to have arguments but sometimes these disagreements can turn into abuse. Children usually use violence to try to “control or bully them” (Parenting and Child Health, n.d.) This violence usually occurs when the child “frightens, threatens or physically hurts them. It can involve using abusive language, pushing, shoving, kicking, throwing things, or threatening with knives or other weapons” ((Parenting and Child Heathen’s.) Children may abuse their parents due to the normalization of that parent getting abused by the other parent within their household. The child may use the parent that abusing the other parent as a model for the way they should act towards their parent as well and justify their actions simply as something that they observed in their household. The violence that children commit against their parents affects that subsystem because it leaves it broken. There is a strain within the parent and child relationship that forms a direct result of constant conflict and abuse between the child and parent. Sometimes, in child-child relationships, an older sibling may become “more aggressive” with their younger sibling because of the abuse that they have witnessed and been exposed to. (Fantuzzo, Mohr, 1999) The children can become socialized by the parents to believe that

Child Abuse. How does one decide what constitutes abuse? Is there a thin line between abuse and discipline? We often hear the horrific stories of child abuse in our communities, but are we as a society so used to hearing these stories that we have become desensitized to them?

In relation to this topic control theory could arguably explain potential effects and impacts on children witnessing domestic violence. This theory is based on the principle that family conflicts may result in an individuals need to maintain and obtain power in a relationship (Britt and Gottfredson, 2003). This could potentially result in the individual forming destructive relationships due to the underlying fact that victim tends to adapt to the abuse and challenge the abuser. This may result the victim begins to modify their behaviour in to the same nature as their abuser as a form of defence mechanism, in order to avoid potential abuse in the