In many countries, the level of crime committed by young people is rising. What are the causes of this problem, and what measures could be taken to address it?

In recent years, the crime committed by young people is becoming more and more serious¹ in many countries. This is a big problem for the society. In this essay, I will discuss the causes of youth crime and give some solutions.

There are many causes of this problem. Firstly, many young people come from a broken family. Their parents are too busy to look after them, or their parents divorced, so they lack of love and care². Secondly, some young people are influenced by bad friends and the violent films or games³. They think crime is cool and want to imitate. In addition, poverty is also a reason, because some poor young people steal money to buy things they want.

To solve this problem, the government and the family should take some measures together. First, parents should spend more time with their children and teach them the right thing. Second, the school should provide more education about the law, let students know crime is wrong and dangerous. Besides, the government should give more job opportunity to young people⁴, so they don't need to commit crime to get money.

In conclusion, the youth crime is caused by many reasons, such as broken family, bad influence and poverty. If the family, school and government work together, I believe this problem will be solved and the society will become better⁵.

Rising youth crime is a genuine concern in many societies, but framing it as a single problem obscures its roots. In my view its causes are best understood as a chain of disadvantage rather than a list of separate factors¹, and the measures most likely to work are those that intervene early in that chain rather than at its violent end.

The deepest cause is not poverty in isolation but the absence of a stake in one's own future. A teenager who sees no realistic path to a decent job, and who has learned from those around him that offending carries little cost, has weak reasons to stay within the law. Family breakdown compounds this, not because a single-parent home is inherently harmful, but because a supervising adult stretched thin has less capacity to notice the early drift toward truancy and delinquent peers². Poverty, weak supervision and low expectations thus reinforce one another, which is precisely why treating any of them alone tends to disappoint.

It follows that punitive measures, though politically popular, address the problem too late. By the time a young person is sentenced, the formative decisions have already been made, and prison frequently deepens criminal identity rather than dissolving it. This is not an argument against consequences, but against relying on them as the primary tool³ when the evidence consistently shows they deter the young poorly.

The more effective interventions target the chain earlier. Mentoring schemes that give at-risk adolescents a stable adult relationship, vocational training that converts a dead-end sense of the future into a concrete one, and properly funded youth services that fill the unsupervised hours after school have all been shown to reduce offending more cheaply than incarceration. Because these measures restore the stake in the future whose absence drives the behaviour, they treat the cause rather than the symptom⁴.

In short, youth crime rises where disadvantage, weak supervision and hopelessness accumulate, and it falls most reliably not through harsher punishment but through early, coordinated support that reaches young people before the courts do. The task for governments is less to react to youth crime than to prevent the conditions that reliably produce it.⁵