Juvenile delinquency refers to criminal acts performed by juveniles. Most legal systems prescribe specific procedures for dealing with juveniles, such as juvenile detention centers.

Juvenile delinquency may refer to either violent or non-violent crime committed by persons who are (usually) under the age of eighteen and are still considered to be a minor. There is much debate about whether or not such a child should be held criminally responsible for his or her own actions. There are many different inside influences that are believed to affect the way a child acts both negatively and positively, some of which are as follows:

* Abandonment
* Social institutions
* Peer pressure

In the United States, a juvenile delinquent is a person who has not yet reached the age of majority, and whose behavior has been labeled delinquent by a court. The specific requirements vary from state to state. In the United States, the federal government enacted legislation to unify the handling of juvenile delinquents, the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Act of 1974.

The act created the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) within the Justice Department to administer grants for juvenile crime-combating programs (currently about only 900,000 dollars a year), gather national statistics on juvenile crime, fund research on youth crime and administer four anticonfinement mandates regarding juvenile custody. Specifically, the act orders:

* Deinstitutionalization: Youths charged with "status" offenses that would not be crimes if committed by adults, such as truancy, running away and being caught with alcohol or tobacco, must be "deinstitutionalized," which in this case really means that, with certain exceptions (e.g., minor in possession of a handgun), status offenders may not be detained by police or confined. Alleged problems with this mandate are that it overrides state and local law,[1] limits the discretion of law enforcement officers and prevents the authorities' ability to reunify an offender with his family.

* Segregation: Arrested youths must be strictly segregated from adults in custody. Under this "out of sight and sound" mandate, juveniles cannot be served food by anyone who serves jailed adults nor can a juvenile walk down a corridor past a room where an adult is being interrogated. This requirement forces local authorities to either free juveniles or maintain expensive duplicate facilities and personnel.Small cities, towns and rural areas are especially hard hit, drastically raising those taxpayers' criminal justice costs. Supporters of the system point to lower sexual assault rates when adults and children are separated.

* Jail and Lockup Removal: As a general rule, youths subject to the original jurisdiction of juvenile courts cannot be held in jails and lockups in which adults may be detained. The act provides for a six-hour exception for identification, processing, interrogation and transfer to juvenile facilities, court or detention pending release to parents. The act also provides an exception of 24 hours for rural areas only.

* Overrepresentation of minority youths: States must systematically try to reduce confinement of minority youths to the proportion of those groups in the population.

Robert Merton believes that there is a serious relationship between poverty and crime. He feels that there are institutionalized paths to happiness in our society. He believes in a society of equilibrium where goals = means. A society of disequilibrium would be adaptation. Merton's Strain Theory suggests five attributes.

1. Innovation: individuals who accept socially approved goals, but not necessarily the socially approved means.
2. Retreatism: those who reject socially approved goals and the means for acquiring them.
3. Ritualism: those who buy into a system of socially approved means, but lose sight of the goals. Merton believed that drug users are in this category.
4. Conformity: those who conform to the system's means and goals.
5. Rebellion: people who negate socially approved goals and means by creating a new system of acceptable goals and means.

Source : www.wikipedia.org