How do kids become delinquents? One study suggests it all starts
with low intelligence. For some time, researchers have known that
delinquents score an average of eight points lower on IQ tests than their
nondelinquent peers. Furthermore, a team of psychologists from the
University of Wisconsin have demonstrated that low IQ begets delinquency
rather than results from it. Moreover, they say the way that low IQ leads
to juvenile delinquency differs between African-Americans and
whites.
The team, headed by graduate student Donald Lynam, followed more
than 600 fourth-graders judged to be at high risk for delinquency. For
two to three years, researchers gathered data on race, socioeconomic
status, behavioral impulsivity, and success in school. Kids took standard
IQ tests at the beginning and end of the study.
The prospective study design demonstrated that, among kids who
later became delinquents, low IQ scores are present well before they take
up nefarious activities.
In addition, boys with impulsive natures are at greatest risk
because they consistently fail to weigh the consequences of their
impulsive actions.
But perhaps the most significant finding, reported in the Journal
of Abnormal Psychology (Vol. 102, No. 2), is the extent to which school
failure presages juvenile delinquency. Students with low IQs are less
likely to succeed in school and therefore less likely to respect the
school as a bastion of authority. So they don't buy into the value system
teachers are trying to transmit.
For African-Americans, the link between school failure and
delinquency is especially pronounced. "When we measured black boys and
white boys who were both performing poorly in school," Lynam said, "it
was only the black boys who were at risk for engaging in
delinquency."
Schools, he explains, exert informal yet powerful social controls
on their students. For African-Americans, who are disproportionately
represented in poor communities, schools may provide the social control
lacking in a neighborhood of overburdened single-parent households. But
if a boy finds school so frustrating that he rejects it, its power is
null, and the chances for engaging in delinquency increase rapidly.
Neighborhood pressures are then free to rush in and fill the void.
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