Youth and Crime

Definitions- 

Crime- An act which breaks the law of any given society.

Deviance- An act which breaks the norms and values of any given society.

ALL CRIME IS DEVIANT BUT NOT ALL DEVIANCE IS CRIMINAL.

Criminal Responsability- The law dictates an age of criminal responsibility- at a certain age you are deemed to fully understand the difference between right and wrong and must accept the punishment.

In the UK(England,Wales & Northern Ireland) the age of criminal responsibility is 10.In Scotland the age is 12.In Ireland the age is 14.In Portugal,Spain and Hungary the age is 16.Poland has the highest age in Europe at 17.

In the UK anyone aged 18 or over is treated as an adult in the CJS (Criminal Justice System),anyone between 10-17 is dealt with by the youth courts and detention centres.

Key statistics;

• The peak age of offending for males is 18,and 15 for females.
• Under 18's account for 25% of ALL CRIME
• THEFT and HANDLING STOLEN GOODS make up over 50% of all youth crimes.
• Less than 15% of youth crimes is violence against the person (VAP)
• 80% of all youth crimes are comitted by males
• Young black males are hugely overrepresented in the crime statistics.

Researching Crime-There are 3 main ways of finding out how much crime there is in the UK;

1- Official Crime Statistics (OCS)- These are published by the Home Office each year and give the figure for ALL RECORDED CRIME in the past 12 months.The amount of recorded crime in 2012 was 4.5 million.This figure though is not a totally accurate picture of how much crime there is in the UK.Many crimes are not reported to the police (sensitive crimes),but many victimless crimes will never get reported eg.drug use/dealing.Also, many crimes that do get reported will not actually be reported.There are currently just over 80,000 people in prison in the UK.

2- Victim Survey- Due to the problem with OCS,the government each year also carry out a victim survey.This is called the British Crime Survey (BCS) and it surveys about 40,000 people about their experiences as victims of crime in the past 12 months.The idea of this research is that it…