Juveniles young and old are committing acts of delinquency all across the globe day and night. To understand why a person commits a delinquent act we first have to examine a couple of things. How old was this person? Were they apart of a gang that influenced them to do so? Is there psychological trauma within the child that creates urges of delinquency? “The classical school of thinking saw the human being as a creature governed by a felicific calculus—an orientation toward obtaining a favorable balance of pleasure and pain.” (Bartollas, 59) Bentham believed that a person would do whatever he or she thought was necessary to achieve most pleasure and least amount of pain. Meaning that say a lower social economic status citizen is provided the opportunity to steal money from a sleeping man, he will carefully outweigh his options before choosing to steal it such as, is he bigger than me to where I will win a fight if I have to or if I’m sneaky enough he won’t even know it was me. It is the ability to outweigh irrational actions like those that contribute only some if not a whole lot of delinquent acts committed by youngsters.
Poverty stricken youth in urban areas are more susceptible to delinquency more than any other demographic there is. Reason being is because they aren’t normally given the best of situations to start with. Problems arise from their environments such as parental supervision, because mom and dad are either working or aren’t together anymore leaving the youth to be raised either by grandma or another elderly family living in the home. This alone creates delinquency in youth because it leaves them malnourished of attention and acceptance from their true role models and are forced to seek out their needs through other influences such as gangs and bonding with other delinquent individuals.
As of recent studies, Intelligence has proven to be a possible factor of juvenile delinquency. “A longitudinal study of 411 students showed that those who later became