Juvenile Delinquency

I volunteer a couple times per semester at a Juvenile Delinquency Center in Mart, just outside of Waco.  We go in and talk to the kids really about whatever they want to talk about and play a couple games of pick-ip basketball or volleyball with them.  Somehow it always gets brought up, but the kid will tell us why he's in the center. Usually this will be burglary, armed burglary, or sometimes sexual assault (which I won't lie is a little discomforting to hear from the child sitting next to me, no older than my little sister).

I always ask what they want to do when they get out.  Some will have stories of hope saying that they want to come to Baylor or college in general, and others say they just want to go home to their mother's cooking.  But you'd be surprised to learn how many of them are repeat offenders and have been in the same Juvenile Delinquency Center more than once.  This screams to me stigmatized shame and recidivism.  The kid will often go home and fall back into the patterns of hanging out with the same bad influence friends who go them in trouble the first time or family members who taught them that crime is accepted in society (Differential Association Theory) and land themselves back in the center.

I think that many people put a negative stigma on criminals, thinking that they are inherently bad people, but more often than not they were raised in an environment that led them to this life of being in and out of prison. Their parents and siblings may be the same way, usually coming from poverty, and it's sad to see this repetitive cycle that they become trapped within.