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Youth and crime

MAHAMUDA RlDlA ROSHNI
For example a young person engaged in financial crime is motivated by a desire for wealth, recognition, social status and achievement in the same way as a businessman.
ALTHOUGH social concern about crime is directed primarily at violent crimes, property crime and public order crime constitute 85-95 of all crimes. Many people believe that crime is the most pressing problem in the US. But is it? How do you know how much crime is committed? How do you know if crime is, in fact, increasing or decreasing? The fact is that what we and the media know about crime, by and large, is based on statistics supplied by government agencies.
Many people commit crimes in our country, even the youths - which is a big problem. The thinking and behaviour of the youth today have been affected by a number of factors. Some of these are expansion of education, increasing unemployment, the recruitment policy of the government, lack of adequate attention and guidance by the parents, tremendous and not very wholesome influence of mass media, newly acquired affluence of some young people, failure of educational institutions in imparting value-oriented education, and questionable influence of the peer group at an intermediate stage between leaving the protection of the family with it's distinctive patterns of behaviour and entering the increasingly impersonal and competitive wider society.
With the emergence of these changes, it is imperative to study why youth deviate from legal and social norms.
Before analysing these issues, we must define "youth." Who are the youth? Is youth age-linked or age- graded? Someone below 12 years of age is called a child, one between 12 and 30 years is viewed as a young person, and one between 30 and 50 years is described as middle-aged.
In sociology and criminology, the focus is on three things when dealing with immature youth offenders:
• Environmental influences
• Resocialisation
• Prevention
A youth s crime is explained as a result of the influence of the social environment on his behaviour. His individual responsibility is thus minimised in all areas. His crime is interpreted as symptomatic of a failure of the social system to protect him.
Crimes requiring little physical strength and alertness like theft etc are characteristic of the very young, while
crimes requiring greater physical energy, skill, and risk, like murder, rape, assault are more commonly committed by youths.
Youth criminals arc not altogether different from law-abiding youths. The motives and satisfaction sought by criminals are the same as those that influence normal young men. For example a young person engaged in financial crime is motivated by a desire for wealth, recognition, social status and achievement in the same way as a businessman. The only difference is that the latter operates within the framework of the law, while the former (criminal) operates outside the law.
One thing that needs to be emphatically stated is that in the area of criminal behaviour, we are not likely to find situations in which are crime always follows a particular event or characteristic.
I selected six causal factors as suggested by some scholars to examine their importance. They are:
• Family
• Companionship
• Deprivation, frustration and stress
• Mass media
• Personality disposition
• Reckless sprit of an adventure
The most direct source of youth criminality has been identified as the family's failure to gratify needs and provide necessary emotional support to maintain social control and to effectively transmit the dominant values of society. A young person of 16-25 years of age is so depend- ent on his family that he requires love, affection and sympathy of both parents. Emotional deprivation comes from lack ofinterestoftlie parents.
My study, however, did not reveal many cases of this type of family situation in the youth criminals. About 70% respondents described their relation with their parents as harmonious, 14% as conflicting, while 17% described their parent's attitude towards them as indif-
ferent. I also did not come across cases in my study in which the youth offenders had acquired their attitude towards or technique of criminality from the family. No respondent described his parents or siblings or any other family member as having a criminal record.
We have presented our arguments against the theoretical perspectives, which explain crime in terms of a man's nature or personality traits. Logically we
don't accept the approach towards the treatment of criminals, which works through typology of behavioural styles grounded in physiology or the psychiatric framework of the offenders or in factors like impulsiveness. Inevitably, we find fault with the idea of transforming human personality by punishment.
Mahamuda Rxlia Roshni, Department of Cnmmology and Police Saence (CPS), Magana Bhasham Science and Technology University (MBSTU).