Nurture to Our Youths
- Legally Speaking
- Jan 25
- 4 min read
Updated: Feb 25
Written by Hannah Oommen on May 13, 2024.
There has been an ongoing debate for years, even decades, about what causes humans to behave the way they do. Many people are familiar with the concepts of Nature vs. nurture, whether how we act depends on our genes and traits or our family's influence and surrounding environments. Nature vs. Nurture has led to more profound questions and is used to justify human behaviors: Could it be our environment? Or the way we grew up? Could we have inherited our personality and behavior? These questions lead us to ponder how we can fix our justice system and decrease reoffending rates among people who we believe will live a life of crime due to their nature or how they were nurtured, which makes us worry about the lives of our younger generations. Can we redirect the lives of younger generations who are involved in criminal behavior to rewrite the scripts of their lives?
Fortunately, youths in juvenile facilities have fallen from 108,800 to 27,600 between 2000 and 2022 (The Sentencing Project). The decline in these numbers could be due to the reconstruction of communities impacted by discriminatory practices like redlining and social reforms for minorities. Despite this, Black youth are 4.7 times more likely to be placed in juvenile centers compared to whites, and Tribal youth are 3.7 more likely.
The racial disparities among youth sent into juvenile detention centers are alarming to many, revealing the biases against minorities.
The doll experiment in the 1940s was a critical point for Americans to realize the impacts of racial and skin color bias on youth and children. The doll experiment findings were even used as evidence to support the points and arguments in Brown v. Board of Education, which overruled Plessy v. Ferguson and desegregated black and white children in America. The Doll experiment revealed that kids assumed those with darker skin complexions were assumed to be dumber and uglier and to have other negative qualities. In comparison, dolls with lighter skin complexions were associated with positive qualities and characteristics.
The findings exposed the harmful impacts racial biases, segregation, and other racial practices had on the self-confidence of kids of color. The Doll experiment was used as evidence to help abolish the separate yet equal clause created in Plessy v. Ferguson, which allowed the practice of segregation of race and upheld Jim Crow laws.
Today, despite continued advocacy, youths are still facing discrimination and harbor harmful beliefs even about themselves due to skin complexion and background. To this day, in recent replications of the doll experiment, many still concluded that most kids associate positive traits with light-complexion dolls and negative traits with darker-complexion dolls.
Research supports that early education impacts all children's overall psychological, emotional, and social well-being. However, racial barriers have prevented children of color from having equal opportunities in education.
“Black children are more likely to be placed in special education classes, given a lower curriculum, and lower grades.” This is due to contributing factors to these disparities consisting of socioeconomic status, access to resources, lack of school readiness, and possible perceived teacher biases (Farkas, 2003). Additionally, students of color face racial prejudice from their peers at school and teachers.
According to Aud et al. (2010), At the early age of 4, researchers discovered distinctions between black and white kids regarding their academic achievements. Latin, Black, and American Indian children are 18.8% to 28.3% are proficient in letter recognition, while White and Asian kids are up to 36.8 to 49.4% proficient in letter recognition, creating a disparity as significant as 30.6%
Although racial biases may not be purposeful, they are still practices that exist and are followed due to racial biases and stereotypes.
In several states, up to 80% of the youths who are incarcerated are rearrested within four years of their release. Reoffending rates for juveniles in America are astonishingly high, and it calls for quick action. Although the number of juveniles held in these centers has been decreasing, reoffending rates continue to go up. A study in 2011 found that 70% to 80% of youth who left residential correctional programs were rearrested within two or three years of release.
Strategies such as restorative justice have been created and used to replace the more punitive justice system we see in America and have been effective at decreasing reoffending rates by 14%. Restorative justice benefits the victims and communities impacted by the crimes by having the offender take accountability for their impact on the community and restoring that impact. Places that use strategies successfully decrease reoffending rates, instilling the idea of implementing these practices in juvenile detention centers. Implementing restorative justice in juvenile justice centers would include community service hours for offenders, conversations between victims and juveniles, depending on the case, and apology letters.
By fixing the behavior of juveniles and having them identify with their communities, we help younger generations potentially and adequately succeed in the future, potentially ending the cycle of abuse and neglect they faced growing up and giving them a community that positively nurtures them. In the debate between Nature vs. Nurture, nurture wins. People have the power to nurture our youths and younger generations, and how they are cared for is vital to their growth and impact on the world.
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