What Are the Social Causes of Youth Crime?

Youth crime has always been a concern in societies around the world. People try to determine the causes to which these problems stem from. This topic intrigued me, so I decided to write an essay on the question relating to this topic, "What are the social causes of youth crime?" The theory that I am going to examine and use to answer this question is the labeling theory. This theory is also known as the societal reaction theory. The labeling theory will often examine the offender in the situation. This theory not only examines the offender, but also the victim and the situation as a whole, instead of breaking it down. This theory claims that a "deviant" is only what the society around him/her describes him as. It also goes on to explain that the reason that many individuals become deviant is because they either grew up in a deviant social surrounding or they are unable to negotiate the rigors of everyday life.
The process of making the criminal is a process of tagging, defining identifying, segregating, describing, emphasizing, making conscious and self-conscious; it becomes a way of stimulating, suggesting, emphasizing, and evoking the very traits that are complained of. [Tannenbaum (1928: 19-20)]
The first, often called labeling or societal reaction theory, begins with a rejection of the idea that people become committed to deviant or criminal roles because they are unable to negotiate the rigors of everyday life or because they grow up in deviant social surroundings. [Cullen (1983: 123-124)] This theory known as labeling or societal reaction theory was formed as a significant paradigm in the 1960s and 1970s. Other deviant theorists tend to focus on the deviant and their behavior, while the labeling theory alters from that and moves on to look at the people who label the deviants and their behaviors. Within this perspective, there are four issues that theorists look at (Cullen and Cullen 1978a, b): origin of the "deviant label" or categories of

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