Essay About Heritage Foundation And Violent Teenage Criminals

Study on Juvenile Psychopaths
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Study on Juvenile Psychopaths
What is the “super predator”? He or she are young hypercriminals
who are committing acts of violence of unprecedented coldness and brutality.
This newest phenomena in the world of crime is perhaps the most dangerous
challenge facing society and law enforcement ever. While psychopaths are
not new, this breed of super criminal exceeds the scope of psychopathic
behavior. They are younger, more brutal, and completely unafraid of the
law. While current research on the super predator is scarce, I will
attempt to give an indication as to the reasons a child could become just
such a monster.
Violent teenage criminals are increasingly vicious. John DiIulio,
Professor of Politics and Public Affairs at Princeton University, says
that “The difference between the juvenile criminals of the 1950s and those
of the 1970s and early 1980s was the difference between the Sharks and the
Jets of West Side Story and the Bloods and the Crips. It is not
inconceivable that the demographic surge of the next ten years will bring
with it young criminals who make the Bloods and the Crips look tame.” (10)
They are what Professor DiIulio and others call urban “super predators”;
young people, often from broken homes or so-called dysfunctional families,
who commit murder, rape, robbery, kidnapping, and other violent acts.
These emotionally damaged young people, often are the products of sexual or
physical abuse. They live in an aimless and violent present; have no sense
of the past and no hope for the future; they commit unspeakably brutal
crimes against other people, often to gratify whatever urges or desires
drive them at the moment and their utter lack of remorse is shocking.(9)
Studies reveal that the major cause of violent crime is not
poverty but family breakdown – specifically, the absence of a father in
the household. Today, right now, one-fourth of all the children in the
United States are living in fatherless homes – this adds up to 19 million
children without fathers. Compared to children in two parent family homes,
these children will be twice as likely to drop out of school, twice as
likely to have children out of wedlock, and they stand more than three
times the chance of ending up in poverty, and almost ten times more likely
to commit violent crime and ending up in jail. (1)
The Heritage Foundation – a Conservative think tank – reported
that the rise in violent crime over the past 30 years runs directly
parallel to the rise in fatherless families. In every state in our country,
according to the Heritage foundation, the rate for juvenile crime “is
closely linked to the percentage of children raised in single-parent
families. And while it has long been thought that poverty is the primary
cause of crime, the facts simply do not support this view. Teenage
criminal behavior has its roots in habitual deprivation of parental love
and affection going back to early infancy, according to the Heritage
Foundation.
A fathers attention to his son has enormous positive effects on a
boys emotional and social development. But a boy abandoned by his father
in deprived of a deep sense of personal security, In a well-functioning
family,” he continued, “the very presence of the father embodies
authority” and this paternal authority “is critical to the prevention of
psychopathology and delinquency.” (2)
On top of the problem of single parent homes, is the problem of
the children whose behavioral problems are linked to their mothers crack
use during pregnancy. These children are reaching their teenage years and
this is “a potentially very aggressive population,” according to Sheldon
Greenberg, director of Johns Hopkins Universitys Police Executive
Leadership Program. Whats more, drug use has more than doubled among 12-
to 17-year-olds since 1991. “The overwhelming common factor that can be
isolated in determining whether young people will be criminal in their
behavior is moral poverty,” Greenberg says. (3)
According to the recently published “Body Count: Moral Poverty . .
. and How to Win America s War Against Crime and Drugs,” a new generation
of “super-predators, ” untouched by any moral inclinations, will hit
Americas streets in the next decade. John DiIulio, the Brookings
Institute fellow who co-wrote the book with William Bennett and John
Walters, calls it a “multi