Examining Miranda's Delinquent Behavior

In this paper, I plan on examining youth delinquency by focusing on a specific subject. The person I’ve chosen to write my paper on is one of my closest friends, Miranda Eaton. Miranda’s delinquent behavior mainly included underage drinking, drug use, and shoplifting as well as cheating in school. To explain her behavior, I will be using both psychological theories for delinquent behavior as well as social control theory. In Miranda’s case, I think that the psychological theories for youth delinquency makes the most sense for a few reasons, although I also think that social control theory has a lot of merit. Miranda is currently a nineteen year old freshman here at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She was raised by her parents in a college
Psychological theories of deviance focus on the deviant person’s psychology rather than social forces to explain delinquent behavior. According to this theory, adolescents who exhibit delinquent behaviors are suffering from psychopathology. Psychopathology, according to Thompson and Bynum, is “some internal neurological disorder or deeply hidden personality disturbance.” If one believes this is true, than when an adolescent acts out, they are simply asking for help in the only way that they know how. There are two types of abnormalities in the psychological structure that can cause delinquency. One type is organic, which is caused solely by a physiological factor of the brain. An example of this would be a disease like a prion that causes the brain to not work, resulting in abnormal behavior. Another type is functioning, which is when environmental factors interplay with both physiological and social factors to result in a disorder. Examples of this include depression, bipolar disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder. These types of mental illnesses are often caused by a traumatic event in the person’s life. Regardless of the cause, psychological theories of delinquency assert that juveniles who are delinquent are psychologically abnormal
Hirschi’s social control theory maintains that delinquents become delinquent because they fail to achieve or maintain a bond with society. Since they lack those bonds, adolescents tend to act out. The four main aspects of this theory are attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief (Wiatrowski pg. 2). When a youth is attached to someone, it means that they have created a significant social tie with them. Commitment involves the idea of investing time and effort into achieving a goal, like going to college. Involvement refers to participation in social activities that lead to socially accepted values and success. Finally, having beliefs means that a youth has accepted the society’s value system. Hirschi postulates that these four ideas work together to cause an adolescent to either remain an upstanding citizen or become characterized as delinquent. If a juvenile cultivates these four types of social bonds, then the risk of delinquency goes down dramatically. These bonds, however, must be cultivated with people who are not delinquent. When one associated with people who perform deviant behaviors, one becomes far more likely to exhibit those behaviors