The report seeks to describe the relationship between juvenile violent crime and children below poverty. In general, violent crime and poverty exhibit a positive correlation. Children born into low-income families encounter adverse life hardships that are likely to push them into violent crime. The environment around which children are brought up affects their actions. In general, behavior is influenced by a complex web of many factors, including environmental factors. In the United States (US), crime is prevalent and highly concentrated in places characterized by low-income families and high poverty levels. Also, criminal actions can be transmissible in areas with high crime since the social environment supports such behavior or people are not arrested generally.
In the US, juvenile courts have usually been looked at as courts of the underprivileged and impoverished. The juvenile courts found in suburban, middle-class, or wealthier jurisdictions have mainly been regarded as exceptions. The juvenile courts do not usually keep track of the income earnings of a child’s relatives. However, a few jurisdictions that have observed the incomes state that a large majority of the children either rely on public finances or their earnings are so low that they cannot sustain them well. Therefore, courts intentionally and positively choose to direct children from low-income areas into the juvenile justice system. The actions are intended to assist the young kids and ease their access to services, responsibility, and correction required to grow to be fruitful grown persons in society. Moreover, children born into poverty surroundings grapple with harmful moments in their lifetime. A case study depicting the America court as harsh and cruel to the juvenile delinquents was the 2006 on Cynthia Brown, 16-year-old girl, convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment by the court of Tennessee (Cohen and Casey, 2014). Although the girl had testified to have killed a man who had tried to rape in the self-defense, such facts did not matter to the court judge and she was tried and convicted as an adult.
As the population growth continues to rise, especially among poor neighborhoods, the number of kids born into or living in poverty will likely keep growing. The effect of this trend is that the number of children below poverty will continue to be subjected to the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Judges in juvenile courts base their argument for sending the young children to courts on the existing economic conditions. The judges consider the kids poor economic background as a sufficient not supportive to their wellbeing, therefore the court system would be the most effective approach for deprived teenagers and their folks to have access to basic amenities. However, this cycle largely disadvantages those it intends to help. The families will let the children engage in crime to be caught and subjected to the juvenile court system to sustain their livelihood. If structural and institutional changes are not affected to help contain this trend, it is expected that the current trend will continue. The following sections of the paper present the data and analysis to show whether this claim is true or false. Sample data indicated in Table 1 below was obtained for analysis from the overall population data that was provided.
The variable in column two is the number of children below poverty. The variable in column three is Juvenile violent crime index that includes murder or no-negligent murder, forceful rape, theft, and aggravated mugging.
Correlation is a statistical technique used to describe the linear relationship between two variables (Bowen, 2015). A calculation is performed on the variables to produce a correlation coefficient. The applicable formula is:
Where; SP =
,
, and
Table 2: Results for the formula.
Using excel correl function, the correlation is -0.11. The result shows that the variables have a negative correlation. There is no sufficient evidence to state that juvenile violent crime and children below poverty are related. Therefore, it can be concluded that children below poverty results are not likely to engage in juvenile violent crime. The data provided does not supports the theoretical narrative.
The data used to perform the calculation contains outliers that could affect the result. According to Bowen (2015), outliers are data points that vary greatly from other data points. The data in table 1 above shows that the main outliers are Oklahoma (23.3 percent) for children below poverty and Utah (11.4 percent). For juvenile violent crime, the outlier is West Virginia (42) and Florida (477).
References
Bowen, C. (2015). Straightforward Statistics. SAGE Publications.
Cohen, A. O. and Casey, B. J. (2014). Rewiring juvenile justice: The intersection of developmental neuroscience and legal policy. Trends in cognitive sciences, 18(2), 63-65.