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
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town and she has one younger brother who is two years younger than her. Both of her parents work for the university in their hometown and their entire family has always been very involved in each other’s lives. Miranda’s delinquent behaviors began when she was around thirteen years old and continued until she was about seventeen. She used to go to college parties and drink alcohol as well as smoke marijuana. She was also briefly addicted to Vicodin. In addition, she used to shoplift on a semiregular basis as well as cheat in some of her classes at school. Although Miranda was never arrested, she frequently got in trouble at school and was punished by her parents. She also thinks a consequence of her actions was having few close friends and stable relationships during this period of her life (Eaton). I have decided to focus on three of Miranda’s behaviors: underage drinking, drug abuse, and shoplifting. Underage drinking in the United States is when anyone under the age of twenty one drinks alcohol (Underage). According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, roughly 35 percent of fifteen year olds have had at least one drink in their lives. Additionally, around 23 percent of people ages twelve to twenty have had a drink in the past month, with males drinking slightly more than females. Underage drinking has a myriad of consequences including impaired judgement, serious injuries, an increased risk of sexual assault, and death. Another behavior exhibited by Miranda during her time as an adolescent was drug abuse. The University of Maryland Medical Center says that drug abuse is “Drug abuse is the recurrent use of illegal drugs, or the misuse of prescription or over-the-counter drugs with negative consequences.” “Past-month use of marijuana remained steady among 8th graders at 6.5 percent, among 10th graders at 16.6 percent, and among 12th graders at 21.2 percent” (Drug). Vicodin use has gone down in the past few years, from 9.7 percent of high school seniors in 2009 to 4.8 percent in 2014. Using more serious drugs like Vicodin can cause death when an overdose occurs. Finally, shoplifting is when someone steals something from a store. According to Cox, Cox, and Moschis roughly 40 percent of shoplifters who are apprehended are adolescents and in anonymous self-report studies a majority of youths admit to skoplifting at one point in their life. Shoplifting is bad because it can give someone a criminal record and get them involved with the judiciary system. One environmental factor that I think impacted Miranda is the college town that she lived in. Since she was around a population that was made up of young adults for most of the year, it was easy for them to find parties to go to and people selling drugs or alcohol. Her town’s population was also fairly conservative, excluding the students, so there was a lot of pressure on Miranda to conform to ideals she did not necessarily agree with. Miranda thinks that her relationship with her family was incredibly rocky during this time, but she attributes that to her behavior rather than anything her parents or brother did. Today, they have a very good relationship. One of the theories that I am applying to Miranda’s deviance is psychological deviance.
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 …show more content…
(Barkan). Another theory that could be applied to Miranda is social control theory, specifically focusing on Hirschi’s social bond theory.
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
yourself. The psychological explanation of deviancy makes sense when applied to Miranda because she has a few mental health problems. In the interview, Miranda talked about how she was diagnosed with a learning disability around this time. Miranda has ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactive disorder. According to the National Institute of Health, ADHD can cause people to be inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive. For Miranda, this meant that she started having trouble in school, even though she was bright. The way certain teachers reacted to her disability also caused some problems. She remembers that she had some teachers who would treat her accommodations more like suggestions, which made school difficult for her. This, of course, frustrated Miranda and made it more likely for her to act out by taking drugs and stealing things. Miranda was also diagnosed with depression around this time in her life. She thinks a major cause of her depression is the sexual assault that she was the victim of when she was a young teenager. She is on medication and also used to go to a therapist, but this disorder certainly caused her to behave in a delinquent way. One way this theory doesn’t make sense is that Miranda continued the delinquent behaviors even after she was medicated for her psychological disorders. If her mental illnesses were the cause of her delinquent behaviors, then they should have disappeared or at least become less frequent when she started treatment for them. Instead, Miranda continued exhibiting these behaviors for a few years after reaching out for help. Another theory that explains Miranda’s delinquency is social control theory. During our interview, Miranda talked about how isolated she felt during her delinquent years. She asserted that she often felt alone and was not really ever able to have a totally normal relationship with someone. Her unhealthy relationships caused her to befriend people that were participating in delinquent behaviors, so she too participated in those behaviors. Miranda also thinks that new strong social relationships are what helped save her from her delinquent behavior. She met her boyfriend and best friend the summer before her junior year of high school and those two stable relationships helped her quit her deviant behaviors. One way this theory doesn’t really make sense with Miranda’s deviant behavior is that she lived in a fairly conservative community. There were a lot of social pressures to keep her from deviating from the norm, and social control theory is normally associated with having very few or no social controls in the environment. Although if you consider the fact that she was in a college town and many of her friends during the deviant part of her life were from the college, it does make more sense. While I think that both the psychological approach to deviant behavior and social control theory make sense, I think that the theory that makes the most sense is the psychological approach. I think this for several reasons. One of the reasons is that Miranda thinks that it’s true. She realizes that her mental illnesses really started to affect her around the same time that she started exhibiting deviant behavior. The deviant behavior was a symptom of her mental illness. Additionally, the timeline of her story puts the deviant behavior earlier than the loss of friendships. Miranda stated that she lost friendships due to her deviant behavior, not the other way around. I personally think that Miranda’s mental illness was the initial cause of her adolescent deviancy, but during that time she lost many of her original friends due to her behavior. After she began treatment for her mental disorders, she realized that all of her old friends had left her. She then made social ties with other delinquents in ways that she characterized as very unhealthy. In a way, I sort of feel like the deviant behavior was caused by the psychological approach to deviance due to Miranda’s mental illnesses but remained a part of Miranda’s life style because of social control theory due to the fact that she did not have any positive social relationships with people who were not delinquent, and even those relationships nearly always ended poorly. Miranda Eaton is one of my closest friends and was a deviant adolescent. Her delinquent behavior included underage drinking, drug use, and shoplifting. The two theories that I felt best accounted for Miranda’s behavior are psychological theories of delinquency and social control theory. Psychological theories of delinquency focus on delinquent behavior as a symptom of mental illness. Social control theory states that deviance is the result of an absence of social controls. While I do feel that both theories make sense in regard to Miranda’s delinquency, I thought that the psychological theories of delinquency made the most sense. I think that this could have future implications on other delinquents. Realizing that mental illness can play a big role in delinquent behavior is important because that normally means that the juvenile really needs help. For example, Miranda both had an undiagnosed learning disability as well as an incredibly traumatic event that caused her to lash out at others. If adults in her life would have realized the signs that something was wrong, Miranda might not have ever become delinquent. I think that adults who spend a lot of time with minors, like teachers or coaches, should be required to take workshops to help them recognize the signs of mental illness in the youths that they work with. This could also help prevent delinquent behaviors by cutting down on the people who experience mental illness. In addition, I believe that adolescents should have better access to psychologists to help them talk through things. In general, America needs to spend more resources on ensuring that those with mental illnesses are not cast aside to fend for themselves. If youth feel comfortable getting help, then delinquency will go down.
town and she has one younger brother who is two years younger than her. Both of her parents work for the university in their hometown and their entire family has always been very involved in each other’s lives. Miranda’s delinquent behaviors began when she was around thirteen years old and continued until she was about seventeen. She used to go to college parties and drink alcohol as well as smoke marijuana. She was also briefly addicted to Vicodin. In addition, she used to shoplift on a semiregular basis as well as cheat in some of her classes at school. Although Miranda was never arrested, she frequently got in trouble at school and was punished by her parents. She also thinks a consequence of her actions was having few close friends and stable relationships during this period of her life (Eaton). I have decided to focus on three of Miranda’s behaviors: underage drinking, drug abuse, and shoplifting. Underage drinking in the United States is when anyone under the age of twenty one drinks alcohol (Underage). According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, roughly 35 percent of fifteen year olds have had at least one drink in their lives. Additionally, around 23 percent of people ages twelve to twenty have had a drink in the past month, with males drinking slightly more than females. Underage drinking has a myriad of consequences including impaired judgement, serious injuries, an increased risk of sexual assault, and death. Another behavior exhibited by Miranda during her time as an adolescent was drug abuse. The University of Maryland Medical Center says that drug abuse is “Drug abuse is the recurrent use of illegal drugs, or the misuse of prescription or over-the-counter drugs with negative consequences.” “Past-month use of marijuana remained steady among 8th graders at 6.5 percent, among 10th graders at 16.6 percent, and among 12th graders at 21.2 percent” (Drug). Vicodin use has gone down in the past few years, from 9.7 percent of high school seniors in 2009 to 4.8 percent in 2014. Using more serious drugs like Vicodin can cause death when an overdose occurs. Finally, shoplifting is when someone steals something from a store. According to Cox, Cox, and Moschis roughly 40 percent of shoplifters who are apprehended are adolescents and in anonymous self-report studies a majority of youths admit to skoplifting at one point in their life. Shoplifting is bad because it can give someone a criminal record and get them involved with the judiciary system. One environmental factor that I think impacted Miranda is the college town that she lived in. Since she was around a population that was made up of young adults for most of the year, it was easy for them to find parties to go to and people selling drugs or alcohol. Her town’s population was also fairly conservative, excluding the students, so there was a lot of pressure on Miranda to conform to ideals she did not necessarily agree with. Miranda thinks that her relationship with her family was incredibly rocky during this time, but she attributes that to her behavior rather than anything her parents or brother did. Today, they have a very good relationship. One of the theories that I am applying to Miranda’s deviance is psychological deviance.
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 …show more content…
(Barkan). Another theory that could be applied to Miranda is social control theory, specifically focusing on Hirschi’s social bond theory.
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
yourself. The psychological explanation of deviancy makes sense when applied to Miranda because she has a few mental health problems. In the interview, Miranda talked about how she was diagnosed with a learning disability around this time. Miranda has ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactive disorder. According to the National Institute of Health, ADHD can cause people to be inattentive, hyperactive, and impulsive. For Miranda, this meant that she started having trouble in school, even though she was bright. The way certain teachers reacted to her disability also caused some problems. She remembers that she had some teachers who would treat her accommodations more like suggestions, which made school difficult for her. This, of course, frustrated Miranda and made it more likely for her to act out by taking drugs and stealing things. Miranda was also diagnosed with depression around this time in her life. She thinks a major cause of her depression is the sexual assault that she was the victim of when she was a young teenager. She is on medication and also used to go to a therapist, but this disorder certainly caused her to behave in a delinquent way. One way this theory doesn’t make sense is that Miranda continued the delinquent behaviors even after she was medicated for her psychological disorders. If her mental illnesses were the cause of her delinquent behaviors, then they should have disappeared or at least become less frequent when she started treatment for them. Instead, Miranda continued exhibiting these behaviors for a few years after reaching out for help. Another theory that explains Miranda’s delinquency is social control theory. During our interview, Miranda talked about how isolated she felt during her delinquent years. She asserted that she often felt alone and was not really ever able to have a totally normal relationship with someone. Her unhealthy relationships caused her to befriend people that were participating in delinquent behaviors, so she too participated in those behaviors. Miranda also thinks that new strong social relationships are what helped save her from her delinquent behavior. She met her boyfriend and best friend the summer before her junior year of high school and those two stable relationships helped her quit her deviant behaviors. One way this theory doesn’t really make sense with Miranda’s deviant behavior is that she lived in a fairly conservative community. There were a lot of social pressures to keep her from deviating from the norm, and social control theory is normally associated with having very few or no social controls in the environment. Although if you consider the fact that she was in a college town and many of her friends during the deviant part of her life were from the college, it does make more sense. While I think that both the psychological approach to deviant behavior and social control theory make sense, I think that the theory that makes the most sense is the psychological approach. I think this for several reasons. One of the reasons is that Miranda thinks that it’s true. She realizes that her mental illnesses really started to affect her around the same time that she started exhibiting deviant behavior. The deviant behavior was a symptom of her mental illness. Additionally, the timeline of her story puts the deviant behavior earlier than the loss of friendships. Miranda stated that she lost friendships due to her deviant behavior, not the other way around. I personally think that Miranda’s mental illness was the initial cause of her adolescent deviancy, but during that time she lost many of her original friends due to her behavior. After she began treatment for her mental disorders, she realized that all of her old friends had left her. She then made social ties with other delinquents in ways that she characterized as very unhealthy. In a way, I sort of feel like the deviant behavior was caused by the psychological approach to deviance due to Miranda’s mental illnesses but remained a part of Miranda’s life style because of social control theory due to the fact that she did not have any positive social relationships with people who were not delinquent, and even those relationships nearly always ended poorly. Miranda Eaton is one of my closest friends and was a deviant adolescent. Her delinquent behavior included underage drinking, drug use, and shoplifting. The two theories that I felt best accounted for Miranda’s behavior are psychological theories of delinquency and social control theory. Psychological theories of delinquency focus on delinquent behavior as a symptom of mental illness. Social control theory states that deviance is the result of an absence of social controls. While I do feel that both theories make sense in regard to Miranda’s delinquency, I thought that the psychological theories of delinquency made the most sense. I think that this could have future implications on other delinquents. Realizing that mental illness can play a big role in delinquent behavior is important because that normally means that the juvenile really needs help. For example, Miranda both had an undiagnosed learning disability as well as an incredibly traumatic event that caused her to lash out at others. If adults in her life would have realized the signs that something was wrong, Miranda might not have ever become delinquent. I think that adults who spend a lot of time with minors, like teachers or coaches, should be required to take workshops to help them recognize the signs of mental illness in the youths that they work with. This could also help prevent delinquent behaviors by cutting down on the people who experience mental illness. In addition, I believe that adolescents should have better access to psychologists to help them talk through things. In general, America needs to spend more resources on ensuring that those with mental illnesses are not cast aside to fend for themselves. If youth feel comfortable getting help, then delinquency will go down.