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Tina Rosler

December 1, 2010

Assignment 4

Juvenile Murders: Who’s Fault?

Sociology Deviance

Kimberly Bottema
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Juvenile delinquent behavior, particularly violent behavior such

as murder, is one of the most important deviant issues we face as a

nation. Despite the social awareness, juvenile delinquency is on the

rise; case in point is the tragic killings that occur in our school

systems such as Columbine and Jonesboro massacres. This rise in

violence gives cause for great concern. Juvenile crime is increasingly

more sophisticated and its participants are becoming younger. Gun

violence has spread out from urban centers into suburbia. How can we

solve the problem of adolescent delinquent behavior without fully

understanding how a juvenile who commits a crime thinks and behaves?

How do we recognize criminal behavior in juveniles? Is it possible that

biological factors play a role in the criminal behavior of a juvenile

offender? Once must also consider what constitutes a juvenile

delinquent, and who gets to decide this label and does the label itself

lead to part of the problem? Is society to blame? Are families to

blame?

As I began to research and examine juvenile criminal behavior, I

found that there was no formal definition of delinquent adolescent

behavior, in part because the word “delinquent” was derived from a legal

term to associate bad behavior being conducted by juveniles. In the

real legal meaning, a delinquent is an adolescent who is being

officially processed by the juvenile court and judged by the court to be

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a delinquent. A delinquent is anyone who has broken a criminal law,

while a status offended is a juvenile who has violated a law applicable

to juveniles only. Although the interpretations differ from state to

state, the premise is that same. There is no uniform definition, and it

is easier for juveniles to be arrested and be labeled as a delinquent.

The court considers juveniles to be dangerous when their behavior

patterns violate the law within the jurisdiction of the juvenile court.

One then has to ask that does the label “delinquent” to a juvenile push

them further on the violence path?[ CITATION Eri97 \l 1033 ]. Some suggest
it does, others do not support this theory. Regardless of your stance

it can be agreed that adolescent delinquents who commit murder are a

huge problem for society and families alike.

For all the theory and speculation about why adolescents commit

murder, the answers seem to not differ that greatly from what we have

learned about adults who commit violent crimes. As with adults, some

adolescents kill because they are chronically aggressive, cold and

unfeeling. Some will kill because they “explode” emotionally. Others

kill because they have been traumatized and are unable to tolerate their

existence. Deprived of love or gratification, they feel justified while

escalating to violence[ CITATION Jam01 \l 1033 ]. A Mental illness and

substance abuse, which often co-occur among juvenile offenders, can

contribute substantially to delinquent behavior. Studies have

consistently found very high prevalence rates of mental illness among

detained and incarcerated juveniles, and juvenile offenders generally.

While estimates of the percentage of juvenile offenders who have mental

health problems vary widely (e.g., between about 30-90%, depending upon

what is included as a mental illness), most estimates are substantially

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higher than the roughly 20% prevalence rate found in the non-delinquent

adolescent population. Indeed, many juvenile offenders have multiple

mental health problems, and about 15-20% have a serious mental illness.

Lack of appropriate treatment in adolescence may lead to further

delinquency, adult criminality, and adult mental illness [ CITATION

Rob97 \l 1033 ]. This starts a cycle that greatly impacts society as

Juvenile delinquents are more than likely going to become adult

delinquents. Whether juvenile or adult if they have a personality that

lacks compassion or leans towards the negative human emotions then in my

mind it would point to the possible potential of a vast array of

problems.

One very large incentive to stop violent juvenile delinquency

would be the cost that it has on society. What does it cost our nation

annually? There is no simple answer to this difficult question. Although

many studies over the years have tried to quantify the total direct and

indirect costs of all crime (adult and juvenile) to government and

society, the results have varied, but all conclude that nationwide costs

are in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars annually [ CITATION

Pau94 \l 1033 ]. The cost to society comes in costs to government to

operate the criminal justice system (police, prosecution, courts,

probation, incarceration, parole). Medical costs to individuals and

government because of injuries suffered due to crime. Property stolen or

damaged resulting from crime. Loss of productivity to society because of

death, medical and mental disabilities resulting from crime. Loss of

work time by victims of crime and their families. Loss of property

values in neighborhoods with high rates of crime. Pain and suffering of

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crime victims, their families, and friends, as well as communities

plagued by crime, and for the basis of this paper the most important

factor the loss of a productive "citizen" when a juvenile offender is

not rehabilitated and continues to commit crime.

Are their early warning signs that are ignored by society and

family? I believe they are but also question if they are truly ignored

per say or if there is a general knowledge deficit as what to do with

these signs. Some of the signs include early-onset delinquents who are

usually males whom have a history of aggression and violent behavior

beginning as early as elementary school age. There may be a link to

Attention Disorders, which are characterized by several symptoms

including impulsiveness, and to Oppositional & Defiant Behavior, which

is characterized by aggression and rule-breaking. A significant number

of early-onset delinquents have an exaggerated tendency to believe that

others have hostile intentions towards them. This belief, along with the

impulsiveness characteristic of attention disorders, may make it

extremely difficult for the child or adolescent to appropriately

evaluate perceived threats in the environment. This combination

frequently leads to conflict with family members and peers, as well as

problems adjusting to different school situations[ CITATION Jam10 \l

1033 ].

Late-onset delinquents (those who become involved in delinquent

behavior during their teenage years) for these juveniles, peer pressure

is likely to be the biggest factor in their decision to engage in

problematic behavior. These adolescents often come from permissive

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families in which they are given a lot of freedom and are not very

closely monitored by the adults who are responsible for them [ CITATION

Jam10 \l 1033 ]. Families are greatly impacted by the children they help

turn into delinquents. By ignoring their actions to make their lives

easier or for whatever reason they use as a justification in their minds

they are affecting not only their family but also society as a whole.

Likewise behavioral scientists focus great time and energy into

trying to predict an individual's propensity for violence. One of the

leading violence researchers, Sarnoff A. Mednick, professor of

psychology at the University of Southern California, has concluded that

''social and family factors are probably more significant than any other

causes'' of violence but said that there are also biological factors.

Dr. Mednick and other researchers have found that the criminally violent

have a sluggish autonomic-nervous-system response, an inordinate number

of minor physical anomalies, and a high prevalence of

electroencephalogram abnormalities. Dr. Mednick said that many violent

individuals suffer defects in the frontal and temporal brain regions,

which have been associated with impaired self-control. His examination

of the evidence, however, leads him to believe that the origin of this

organic brain dysfunction is not genetic. Rather, he thinks the brain

impairments result from accidents or other environmental events. Most

brain-impaired youngsters are not violent. ''A stable family life

protects a brain-damaged youth,'' he said[ CITATION Med08 \l 1033 ].

With his theory parents are more to blame than any other factor.

The above theory leads to yet another question. How can someone

who does not commit a crime get charged for the crime committed?  Should
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parents be charged with their child’s crime? While yes would seem the

logical answer, I must say "No," with some qualifications. First of all,

why are some minor children criminals? They might have wonderful, God-

fearing, law abiding, caring and compassionate parents who have raised

them well, but other factors have run interference. Although parents

are responsible for raising and teaching their children what is right or

wrong, parents should not be held responsible for the crimes of their

children because they did not commit the crime and if they are not

present at the crime scene, how can they stop their child from

committing such an act.   It violates a parent’s constitutional rights

to charge them with the crime, and doesn’t serve as a deterrent to

juvenile crime.  

Children that come from great homes and have great parents still

commit crimes which can’t be stopped by their parents. Children are

individual thinkers and decision makers so things don't always go as

planned because the “planner” and the “planee” are two different people.

Unless the crime committed by the juvenile is because of abuse or

neglect than the parent should be held responsible. Noting most

incidences in life are not as simplistic as they appear, it is always

relevant to gather all the information about as many preceding events as

possible, particular when dealing with minors before attempting to

charge a family. The repercussions on a family dynamic are multiplied

when charged with crimes of their child especially when they had no

control over the situation.

On the other side of the coin there is a continued awareness for

the need to explain what a normal reaction to a violent crime is to the

families rather than blame them. Along with that there is a desire to
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help families of not only victims, but also the family of perpetrators

whom both suffer greatly. People and families can be affected in many

different ways when they become a victim of a violent crime. While

certain emotions such as anger or fear are common, some victims don't

react in this way. Some retreat into themselves not speaking of the

incident. Others develop long-term problems, such as depression or

anxiety-related illnesses. And a few experience a severe, long-lasting

reaction after a crime known as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

One of the things that makes a violent crime particularly hard to cope

with is knowing that it was committed deliberately by another person.

Unlike an accident or illness, where there is normally no harm intended,

people who commit a crime have done it with intention to cause

harm[ CITATION Eri97 \l 1033 ] . Getting victims help with these issues is

I believe another instrumental key to stopping the cycle of violence.

Families need to know they are not alone and they need to be able to

seek help for any children in the family so they do not follow in their

siblings shoes.

Tying in the family in a different way is Dr. Lewis’s belief that

another reason there may be more homicidal behavior among children is

the cutback in mental health facilities in recent years. As a result,

she said, ''you have more and more extremely disturbed people who are

trying to raise children with very few supports.'' In studying violent

children, Dr. Lewis has found that about four-fifths have witnessed

extreme violence directed at themselves or others, usually in their own

homes. This is true for only 20 percent of nonviolent children, she

said. ''It curdles your blood to hear what the parents have done,'' she

said. Dr. Lewis is among the researchers who believe ''the best
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predictor of violence is past violence, “The earlier the violence, the

worse the prognosis.'' [ CITATION Jam01 \l 1033 ]. Families can be both

negatively affected and to blame at the same time. The basis for

discussion and research on this paper is based on the story of William

Bosket whom fits the above theory that children without family support

and abuse can become violent. It is a brief glimpse at how one

delinquent can affect society and multiple families in the process due

to his violent acts.

Willies father Butch came from a dysfunctional family where his

mother was an alcoholic and his father, when not in prison, used to

violently beat him. Butch was sent to a reform school for robbery and

had begun to receive some positive help with his mental and self esteem

issues. When Butch was fourteen, he was sent to live with his father,

who had moved to New York after serving jail time for armed robbery.

James began to beat him and punch him again undoing all the benefits

from the reform school, and Butch was ready now to fight back. By this

time, he had developed hallucinations and was eventually diagnosed with

childhood schizophrenia, which was later changed to Conduct Disorder.

They considered him on his way to becoming a psychopath, a person with

no empathy and diminished control over his impulses. However, he scored

in the 130 IQ range, considerably above average, and he had the

advantage of being handsome. It did not take long before Butch was

arrested for armed robbery and received five years in prison, the same

as his father had before him. He was constantly in fights and was

diagnosed as having an antisocial personality disorder, with a poor

prognosis[ CITATION Fox95 \l 1033 ].

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The background of Willie’s father was necessary to explain so that

one could compare Willie who by the age of eleven has been evaluated by

numerous professional and had been found to be an angry, hostile,

homicidal boy whom no one could reach. As related to his father’s life,

in this case, history definitely repeated itself. He showed

grandiosity, narcissism, poor impulse control, infantile omnipotence,

and a history of suicide attempts and daily threats against others. His

diagnostic evaluation was Antisocial Behavior, just steps away from the

Antisocial Personality Disorder diagnosis slapped on his father. Willie

was not psychotic, but he was certainly dangerous. Even as young as he

was at the time, it was predicted that he would eventually kill someone.

Only a few short months later he would do just that [ CITATION Fox95 \l

1033 ].

By 1978, at the age of 15, Willie had committed two murders. Even

with sound evidence, there was not much a court could do to a juvenile,

despite his record and a clear indication that he might very well kill

again. Willie had made the claim many times to juvenile authorities that

his father was a killer and he was going to be one, too. Violence, he

had learned, won him respect. Growing up, he learned to throw temper

tantrums, to hit his teachers, to steal, and in general to live life on

his own terms. His grandfather had sexually abused him when he was nine.

He repeatedly told people he did not care if he lived, and it seemed

that he had nothing to lose. Nothing meant anything to him. He never

even had to face up to any of his criminal acts against others, because

a juvenile was considered incapable of criminal intent, so he easily

maneuvered his way through the idealistic cracks of the system and

always ended up back home[ CITATION Fox95 \l 1033 ].

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Violence became a sport that he was good at. Even at the

Spofford Juvenile Center where he was confined awaiting trial, he had

stabbed another boy with a fork, hit a counselor in the face, and choked

a psychiatrist. Later he bragged that, though he was only fifteen, he

had committed over two thousand crimes, twenty-five of them stabbings

(James A Fox). Willie was placed with the Division of Youth for a

maximum sentence of five years. By the time he was twenty-one, he would

be free. The Division of Youth, for their part, felt they had done all

that they could. There were no programs or facilities for a child like

Willie, who had such an explosive temperament (Butterfield, 1995).

A week later, New York authorities called the legislature back to

Albany for a special session, passing the Juvenile Offender Act of 1978.

Under its terms, kids as young as thirteen could be tried in adult court

for murder and would face the same penalties. This law reversed the

tradition of the past 150 years that children were malleable and could

be rehabilitated and saved. There was now an attitude that there were

truly bad kids and they should be locked away from society. It was too

late for Willie to be tried under this law, but it certainly changed

things for others his age. With the passage of this law, New York

became the first state to take this step. Yet as juvenile crime

statistics worsened around the country, other states followed suite. The

press, the public, and prosecutors in New York took to calling it the

Willie Bosket law. He got the notoriety he wanted, but not quite in the

way he had imagined when he bragged to everyone that he would become a

killer just like his dad. After serving four years, Willie was returned

to the Division of Youth and placed in another facility for boys

(Butterfield, 1995). When he turned twenty-one, he was released. He

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would continue his life of crime and 100 short days after his release he

would commit his third felony fall under the three-strike law. He was

given a life sentence fulfilling his initial psychologists’ prophecy

(Butterfield, 1995).

Willie Bosket, killer at age 15, is no longer an anomaly. The

number of young boys committing violent crimes like rape and murder has

increased dramatically in the 1990s, even as the murder rate for adults

has declined. Criminologists predict that this will only get worse. Some

state legislatures are making the age in which children are eligible for

waiver into adult courts increasingly lower. Adolescents in Florida are

on death row. In New York, 85% of the young people released by the

Division for Youth are re-arrested. Prison has come to represent a rite

of passage for some groups. As a result, instruments for predicting

dangerousness at younger ages-early enough to intervene and possibly

prevent future crimes-have been developed and improved. Model programs

have been put into place to help parents with parenting skills, and to

alert communities to the need for coherence and vigilance [ CITATION

Ame97 \l 1033 ]. Research has identified certain brain dysfunctions,

parental loss or rejection, and the development of the diphasic

personality and the trauma control model as potential factors in the

development of a killer. In the future, identifying the diphasic,

emotionally isolated child and helping him or her to connect with people

could potentially occur in the school. Perhaps brain scans as well as

school-based behavioral evaluations could indicate those people who

might benefit from psychotherapy, social skills interventions,

medication, or some combination of the above to prevent or control their

aggressiveness (James A Fox).

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For Willie, this all came too late. A few months after he was

sentenced for stabbing the guard, he bashed another guard in the head,

for which he received an additional life sentence. He then threw hot

water in the face of another guard. He soon came to be known as the most

dangerous criminal in the New York system, and was kept in a specially

constructed isolation cell. The guards are forbidden to speak to him. He

has no electrical outlets, no television or newspapers. Behind the bars

of his cell is a sheath of plexiglass. Four video cameras keep him under

surveillance at all times. Whenever he goes out, he is thoroughly

shackled with an automobile tow chain. He feels he is on death row with

no hope of escape in the electric chair. Sometimes he mourns the

reckless violence of his youth, other times he feels sorry for himself

and all those things in life that he missed. And because of him, the

juvenile justice system will never been the same (Butterfield, 1995).

It is hard to say what actually triggered Willies violence. Was

it genetics, his father’s and grandfather’s histories that would have

deemed him “bad” from birth? Did he have a brain anomaly that could

have been corrected if he was raised in a stable home or was he just a

victim of circumstances? I don’t believe we will ever fully know what

goes on in the mind of killer but with help from early intervention

programs discussed above hopefully we will be able to help them more

than we were able to help Willie as I believe part of Willies problems

were a failure of society to not only protect him from others but also

to protect him from his family and ultimately from himself. There is no

doubt that society is impacted greatly by juvenile delinquents, be it

financially, culturally, emotionally, or other numerous reasons.

Families are impacted in the same ways. These impacts make it

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imperative for us to understand what causes children to go “bad” if we

wish to preserve our way of life.

Works Cited
Amen Daniel, S. Y. (1997). "Visualizing the Firestorms in the Brain: An inside look at
the Clinical and Physiological Connection using Brain SPECT Imaging". Journal of
Phychoactive Drugs 29, No 4 , 307-319.
Butterfield, F. (1995). All God's Children: The Bosket Family and the American
Tradition of Violence. New York: Avon.
Heaton, P. (1994, January 17). Cost of Crim: 674 Billion. U.S. News and World Report ,
pp. 40-41.
Hickey, E. (1997). Murderes and Their Victims. Belmont: Wadsworth.
James A Fox, J. L. (2001). The Will to Kill. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
James Butcher, S. M. (2010). Abnormal Psychology. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
Mednick, D. (2008, April 10). Protecting Students Beyond Stopping Violence. Journal
News , pp. 4-11.
Robert Ressler, T. S. (1997). I Have Lived in the Monster. New York: Saint Martin's
Press.
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