Children Will Not Become Criminals When They Get Older Providing They are Loved and Cared For in Their Impressionable Years

By Lynn A. Granata

There's really no magic formula for raising kids to be good. It's difficult to really know whether nature plays a role or if nurture does. Culture can play a role.  Black and Asian cultures are different from say white christian and Jewish cultures. The funny thing is that prison populations are enormously overpopulated with black and Latino cultures. There are so many reasons why, demographics plays a role, as does socioeconomic level, single parent families, and who they associate with in school and where they live.  Another point to mention is do they gravitate to drug ring gangs or do they get beaten up or bullied inside of school?

Children who are raised in abusive homes are at the highest risk of turning to criminal behavior by the time they reach their teens. Children who are neglected do as well.  The two variables are intertwined. A young teen aged girl may turn to stealing or shop lifting if she sees that all her friends are wearing the hottest new sneakers and jeans, expensive clothing, and even new cars. 

 But, she doesn't because her parents are poor for being middle aged. Except they fight and argue all of the time over how the rent is going to get paid first, then how the food is going be bought. These children are hapless victims, they didn't ask to be here. 

She ends up attending school in dirty clothes and has to beg from her friends to get her lunch money.  Eventually then she ends up dropping out of high school. In hopes to find some new low end job, like working in a fast food place.  She tries it and doesn't like it. She feels degraded and wants what her friends have. She sees that they don't have to work hard to buy those things, because their parents are better providers than hers.

Here's where the tragedy begins. Both parents were high school dropouts and thus unable to obtain good well-paying jobs and careers. They wind up working for minimum wage. They lose their minimum wage job, and wind up struggling, they can't take care of themselves, let alone a dependent child. So she turns to crime to get the things she wants, or thinks that she should have, in order to catch up with her friends. Prostitution is where she starts, then shop lifting. Eventually she winds up addicted to street drugs to quell the pain and stress of being a sex worker. 

She has her male "agent" who takes her money and essentially uses it mostly on himself; he is buying big fancy clothes and a car. One day she takes an awful beating from her "agent" and so she picks up a cast iron pan and smashes it over his head, and kills him instantly.  She is arrested and charged with 1st degree murder.  But she is hoping for a plea bargain to get it reduced to 2nd degree murder or voluntary manslaughter.

So, that pretty much wraps up her downward spiral into a perpetual life of crime.

Note: This story is not based on the life of any particular person living or not living, it is totally fictional.  Any similarity of any person living or not living is purely coincidental.