Juvenile Crime: A Problem of the Delinquent Child or the “Delinquent” Parent?

Dealing with juveniles who commit crimes is a major issue in our society today. In most states, a minor is considered to be someone who is under the age of eighteen years old. Persons who are minors do not have legally binding signatures, cannot legally hold a job without parent’s or guardian’s permission, nor can they rent a place to live, buy a car, or obtain a credit card on their own. In addition, minors cannot vote nor have medical procedures performed on them. However, when a minor commits a crime, punishment is sometimes handed down to them as if they were an adult, depending upon the nature of the crime, the state the minor is being sentenced in, as well as the judge that presides over the case.

Rita Kramer wrote an essay about the justice system for juveniles entitled Juvenile Justice is Delinquent. She states in her essay, “The Juvenile Justice System was designed to function as a kind of wise parent providing rehabilitation”. This statement, alone, has caused many to ask questions such as: Where does this leave the juvenile’s actual parents? If a minor cannot obtain employment or have medical procedures done without parental consent, why should he or she be then punished without parental involvement? Many minors do have “…families who undertake to be responsible for them”  if he or she is sentenced to house arrest and while serving out their probation period rather than surrendering them to a state facility while so many do not have that “luxury”. This, however, seems to be odd and even a little ironic that those parents “elect” to be responsible for their child during the time the child serves out his or her punishment for the crime he or she committed. One question comes to mind concerning those parents: Were they not responsible for their child before he or she committed the crime as well as during?

Incidents of mass murder involving minors have become a major problem and tragedy for our country. States such as Colorado, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas minors calmly walked into their classrooms or on school property and began randomly spraying bullets at their peers. Not one of the parents noticed any kind of signs in their child who committed these acts before these tragedies occurred. Surely, they must have had some kind of change in their moods, habits, and what-not before hand. If parents do not at least have a moral obligation to their child, they should have and be held responsible for; a legal obligation making sure their child is properly cared for even concerning their mental state of mind. Depending upon each situation, if parents were being held accountable for their children’s actions from a legal standpoint such as crimes their child commits, possibly this could help with the elimination of some juvenile crimes. Maybe, if we, as a nation, could or would go back to raising our children with the Golden Rule, “Spare the rod, spoil the child”, there just may not be as much crimes being committed by juveniles as we are currently seeing on a daily basis.