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It being not only possible but even easy to predict which ten-year-old
boys are at greatest risk of growing up to be persistent
offenders, what are we doing with the information? Just about
the last thing that we should do is to wait until their troubles
have escalated in adolescence and then attack them with the
provisions of the new Criminal Justice Bill.
If this bill becomes law, magistrates will have the power to
impose residential care orders. More young people will be drawn
into institutional life when all the evidence shows that this
worsens rather than improves their prospects. The introduction
of short sharp shocks in detention centres will simply give more
young people a taste of something else they don't need; the
whole regime of detention centres is one of toughening
delinquents, and if you want to train someone to be anti-establishment,
"I can't think of a better way to do it," says the writer of
this report.
The Cambridge Institute of Criminology comes up with five key
factors that are likely to make for delinquency: a low-income
family, a large family, parents deemed by social workers to be
bad at raising children, parents who themselves have a criminal
record, and low intelligence in the child. Not surprisingly, the
factors tend to overlap. Of the 63 boys in the sample who had at
least three of them when they were ten, half became juvenile
delinquents — compared with only a fifth of the sample as a
whole.
Three more factors make the prediction more accurate: being
judged troublesome by teachers at the age of ten, having a
father with at least two criminal convictions and having another
member of the family with a criminal record. Of the 35 men who
had at least two of these factors in their background, 18 became
persistent delinquents and 8 more were in trouble with the law.
Among those key factors, far and away the most important was
having a parent with a criminal record, even if that had been
acquired in the distant past, even though very few parents did
other than condemn delinquent behaviour in their children.
The role of the schools emerges as extremely important. The most
reliable prediction of all on the futures of boys came from
teachers' ratings of how troublesome they were at the age of
ten. If the information is there in the classroom there must be
a response that brings more attention to those troublesome
children: a search for things to give them credit for other than
academic achievement, a refusal to allow them to go on playing
truant, and a fostering of ambition and opportunity which should
start early in their school careers. |
