Factors Influencing Juvenile Delinquencies Among Juvenile
[A CASE STUDY OF BORSTAL TRAINING INSTITUTE GANMO, KWARA STATE.]

    In America, children as young as three years of age could be brought before the court, while in England a girl of seven was hanged. In Massachusetts, in 1871, 1,354 boys and 109 girls were handled by the courts. Reform schools proliferated during the 19th century and were criticized for failing to prevent the apparent increase in delinquency. Reformers called “child savers” - believed that juveniles required non-instructional treatment that would reflect the natural family (Platt, 1969).
    This legal and humanitarian concern for the well-being of children led to the establishment of the first juvenile court in Cook County Illinois, in 1899. By 1925, all but two states had followed the Illinois example. Thus, it seems fair to say that the idea of juvenile, delinquency is a relatively modern construction, a notion shared by writers such as Gibbons and Krohn (1991), Empey (1982), and Short (1990). The data on delinquency, however, are not limited to the legal status of juvenile delinquency, because counsellors are just as interested in unofficial as in official acts of delinquency.
    Moreover, the gender debate on juvenile delinquency has concluded that the phenomenon does not vary by sex as male and female juveniles engage in delinquent acts. However, male rates in cases of juvenile delinquency are almost the same for the female, especially for sex offences, truancy and incorrigible conducts, but differ in other delinquent tendencies such as stealing and aggregated assault (Iwarimie – Jaja 1999:43).
    Sequel from the above background information, this study will attempt to focus on the trends, patterns and factors responsible for juvenile delinquency. It will also show how socio-biological and psychological conditions can have expulsive effects on the child and make for engagement in delinquent activities. Furthermore, the essential purpose of this study is to reformulate and apply to our society the theoretical framework which writers who have studied juvenile delinquency have used. In this way, the study intend to adopt a holistic or multidisciplinary approach for the explanation of juvenile delinquency.
Statement of the Problem
    The problem of juvenile delinquency has engaged the attention of various scholars especially in the developed countries. Without mincing words, juvenile delinquency has “calamitous effects” in our contemporary societies. Efforts to discover its causes/roots reveal that it is an endless effort to attribute its roots/causes to a single factor such as poverty, family environment, biochemical make-up, genetic factors to mention but a few.
    The nature and scope of the juvenile delinquency vary from non-violent, to violent and from minor to serious offences. They include minor or single offences like cheating, fighting, lying, truancy and stealing to serious offences such as murder, arson, burglary, destruction of property and armed robbery. It also includes acts of drunkenness, alcoholism, prostitution, drug trafficking and peddling; fraudulent practices, bribery, corruption and counter feinting. For these acts of infringement, “the delinquent child is not tried under the criminal laws, but by the jurisdiction of the juvenile court which must do everything possible to help the child, because of the presumption that he/she is immature and lacks criminal intent (Iwarimie – Jaja, 1999:41).
    There is no gain-saying the fact that delinquent juveniles are likely to graduate into adult criminals. Iwarimie – Jaja (1999) explains the link between juvenile delinquency and adult criminality. That is, to explain the process that are involved when a juvenile or a young person who has been involved in delinquency or has been associated with delinquent gangs or friends, and/or have been processed through the Nigerian Criminal Justice System and have continued to commit delinquency until he becomes an adult, or even stops his delinquent acts or association with delinquent or criminal friends, but suddenly begins to commit crime when he reaches adult age.
    Studies by Wolfgang and his associates (1972) supported the linkage between juvenile delinquency and adult criminality. Wolfgang and his associates (1972) studied criminal careers of cohort boys (9,945) born in 1945 and followed their criminal activities until when they became 18 – year – old in 1963. From official police records in their Philadelphia study, they discovered that their sample contained 3,475 boys with police contact, 1862 delinquent youths were recidivists, 1,613 of them were first time offenders. 1,862 of them were first time offenders. 1,235 of them had been in police custody more than once but less than five, times, while 627 of them had been arrested five times or more. According to Wolfgang et.al 1972, the 627 delinquent recidivists with arrest record of five times or more account for 5,305 offences or 51% of all offences in the area. These offenders are identified as the chronic offender committed serious crimes; 69% of the aggravated assaults, 71% of the homicides, 73% of the rapes, and 83% of the robberies.
    Wolfgang and associates in a second study (Birth Cohort II) used a larger sample of youths (males and females) born in Philadelphia in 1958. They found that the 1958 cohort of youths was significantly more involved in serious crime than the 1945 group, their violent offence rate is 149 per 1,000 in the sample (i.e. three times higher) than the rate for the 1945 group (which is 47per 1,000 subjects). However, the 1945 cohort study found that crime offenders dominate the total crime rate and continue their law violating career as adults.
    Indeed, Iwarmie Jaja’s study (1999) shows also that juvenile recidivists are the ones that mature to become armed robbers. As he puts it:
No individual gets up one day and decides to rob a bank or a residence armed with a gun. This is because armed robbery is a high-level criminal act which criminals must graduate into commit either individually or in gang context (Iwanmie – Jaja, 1999: 72).