Juvenile Delinquency Paper

During my undergraduate study as a criminal justice major I had a lot of experiences with juvenile delinquency. I visited the Regional Youth Detention Center (RYDC) and many of the youth I encountered had similar stories. Majority were African-American. There were males and females, separated of course. They all grew up in poverty and had relatives that had been incarcerated or were incarcerated at that time. They didn’t have any role models to look up to. They repeated what they saw. While I was spending all this time with these juveniles it really allowed me to see firsthand what the social learning theory actually meant. The juvenile justice system was in no way trying to understand what landed these adolescents in the system all they were willing to deal with was the fact that they were there. They didn’t care that it was a generational cycle. By seeing this and how disproportionate it was in the RYDC I knew then that I wanted to be a part of the change. By looking at the RYDC you would have thought the city I resided in at the time was majority blacks but it wasn’t. The county did have a lot of poverty though. The people …show more content…
We had girl’s night with the females where it brought pop corns and watched movies with them. We something like a field day where we just did activities with them like kick ball, dodge ball, etc. We even had days where we would go up there and just read to them and with them. When we first started going they couldn’t believe it. They didn’t even think that they deserved to have fun. Even the youngest boy I met who was age nine didn’t feel that he deserved any type of affection. They had days where they would tell us their life stories and most would be emotional. I more amazed at how many actually saw themselves headed down the wrong road but felt as though that was in fact all they