Juvenile Delinquency: a Criminological Screenshot of Modernity

Abstract

Juvenile delinquency has been significantly decreasing in recent years. Meanwhile, the data provided by official statistics reflect not the actual, but only the registered level of juvenile delinquency, characterized by its latency. There is also a liberal attitude of criminal justice authorities to minor acts committed by minors, which leads, on the one hand, to a decrease in the personal responsibility of minors and, as a consequence, to their committing repeated crimes, on the other hand. As a result, the court chooses an ineffective punishment measure. Therefore, the relevance of the study is beyond a doubt. Criminological analysis of juvenile delinquency as a systemic phenomenon, the study of its causes and conditions and negative social phenomena are the purposes of the paper. The author uses specific scientific methods: questionnaires, expert assessments and statistical research methods. The empirical basis consists of statistical data on registered crimes committed by minors in the Russian Federation in 2010–2020, the data of the Administration of the Justice Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation for 2014–2020 as well as the results of published sociological and criminological studies conducted by other authors. It seems that criminal associations of minors not only promote a criminal lifestyle, imposing it on teenagers, but also serve as a platform for involving minors in various illegal activities, which are more typical for the adult criminal environment. The forms of self-affirmation a particular group chooses depends directly on the leader's behavior, his attitudes, the level of criminogenic contamination of the environment and the criminal tendencies of the group.