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Juvenile Delinquency Essay examples

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Juvenile Delinquency

I. The harsh beginnings.
Children were viewed as non-persons until the 1700's. They did not receive special treatment or recognition. Discipline then is what we now call abuse. There were some major assumptions about life before the 1700's.
The first assumption is that life was hard, and you had to be hard to survive. The people of that time in history did not have the conveniences that we take for granted. For example, the medical practices of that day were primitive in comparison to present-day medicine. Marriages were more for convenience, rather than for child-bearing or romance.
The second assuption was that infant and child mortality were high. It did not make sense to the parents in those days to create …show more content…

Industrialization.
Industrialization set into motion the processes needed for modern juvenile delinquency. The country had gone from agriculture to machine-based labor-intensive production. Subsistence farming quickly turned into profit making. People who were displaced from their farm work because of machinery were migrating to the city to find work. This led to urbanization in such places as Chicago, which in turn caused the cities to burst at the seams.
II. Urbanization.
There was a huge increase in the amount of movable goods that were produced. These movable goods were easy to steal. The stealing of these goods made property crime rise tremendously in these urban centers. The wealth of the upper-class increased, and stealing became a way of living.
These large urban centers also created another problem. The work place was now seperated from the home. During the hard times both parents took jobs. There was also very little for the youths to do, especially when school was not in session. It was then that youths were becoming increasingly unsupervised. These youths were largely unemployed. Without supervision, and with movable goods easily available, stealing became a way of life.
The huge influx of people to these urban areas overwhelmed society. The factories could not keep up, and unemployment became a factor. Poverty became widespread.
III. Salvage Attempts.
Poorhouses were created to keep youthful offenders away from trouble. The idea

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