Risk Factors Of Juvenile Delinquency

There is no debate that a person’s family has a significant influence on the person they become. A child’s home life can significantly impact the course their life will take. When a child misbehaves people are quick to blame their parents, phrases such as “the apple never falls far from the tree” suggest that children are highly influenced by their family and that delinquency is the fault of parents. Therefore, the question this paper will investigate is how a child’s home life and environment affect them and more specifically how these factors affect their chances of being delinquent.This is an important question because the sooner causes of delinquency or protective factors can be pinpointed the better equipped society will be to reduce the amount of children who enter into or return to the juvenile court system. …show more content…
The first risk factor is socioeconomic status, also known as SES, according to a study by Robert J. Sampson (1986) the probability of police-suspect encounters ending in arrest declines substantially with increasing neighborhood socioeconomic status. This means that juveniles who reside in neighborhoods with higher SES are less likely to come into contact with police. Although juveniles who grow up in “nicer” neighborhoods are less likely to come into contact with police that does not automatically mean they are less delinquent. In the same study, juveniles who were picked up by the police for an offense were asked if they had done what the police accused them of, 43 percent of the boys living in low SES neighborhoods responded that they had not, whereas only 25 percent of the boys residing in high SES areas claimed innocence (Sampson, 1986). This illustrates that higher rates of delinquency in children who live in neighborhoods with a lower SES are not caused by these children being more delinquent but rather by being under greater