Teen Curfews are Ridiculous Essay Example for Free

Teen Curfews are Ridiculous Essay Earl Manning, my life-long mentor, says, Teen curfews are quite possibly the best thing ever. Teens are evil, corrupt beings and a curfew is all the world needs to cage up teen crime. Though most of Earls wise teachings are true and insightful, on this subject he is terribly mistaken. Teen curfews are not the right solution to the problem of juvenile crime because they enroach on the rights of teens and parents, are ineffective, and there are much better solutions. First of all, how can teen curfews be a good solution if they enroach on the rights of teens and their parents? Civil rights groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stand up for the rights of Americans as given to them by the Constitution of the United States. Teen curfews violate First Amendment rights, particularly the right to assemble. According the time line taken from Milestones in Teen Curfews in the United States, the courts agreed in 1989. U.S. District Judge Charles Richey blocked the implementation of a Washington DC curfew, essentially calling it unconstitutional. He said the ordinance would raise serious constitutional claims for teens. Curfews constitutionality was again questioned in November 1995 when the ACLU filed a lawsuit in U.S. District court. Then again in July 2000 the rights of American teens prevailed when a federal district court judge found that Indianas 1945 curfew violates the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Advocates of juvenile rights and upholding the Constitution also make it clear that curfews invade on the rights of parents to raise their children. Laws exist to protect citizens, not suppress their basic freedoms as guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. A primary reason curfews are not the right solution to the problem of juvenile crime is that they are not, have not been, and will not be effective. According to the article Teen Curfews, 146 of the nations 200 largest cities now enforce teen curfews, yet juvenile crime rates nationwide remain largely higher than in the past. If teen curfews really are effective, then it would be assumed that there would be a decrease in the juvenile crime rate, or at least a maintenance of status quo. Statistics show that most juvenile crime occurs between the hours of 3 P.M. and 6 P.M.  Thus it would be fruitless to enact curfews that do not attack the problem head on. As James Alan Fox, the dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern University, says, The problem with curfew laws is that most kids, the good, the bad and the tired, are asleep at midnight. Past curfews faced these same problems. The time line shows that many cities had passed curfew laws by the 1980s, yet the juvenile violent-crime rate surges upward. Then in the 1990s there was a resurgence of teen curfews to combat juvenile crime, but according to the article the juvenile violent-crime rate.. has climbed [over the past four years], except in 1995, when curfews met resistance from the ACLU. In June 1998, a study on the impact of curfews on juvenile crime in California, released by the Justice Policy Institute, finds that curfews are more a public relations gimmick than an effective crime-fighting tool. The future of curfews looks equally grim and ineffective. According to John DiIulio Jr., a leading crime expert, The large population will give rise to a new and more vicious group of predatory street criminals than the nation has ever known. Arthur Spitzer, the legal director of the ACLU, says, I find it very hard to believe that a curfew would have any significant effect on teenagers who are selling drugs, stealing cars or carrying a gun, which DiIulio suggest is the future of American youth. In February 2000, a survey released by the National League of Cities concludes that curfews do little to reduce hard core gang activity. Lastly, there are better, more effective solutions than teen curfews. The conflict of teen curfews could be avoided all together if such actions were taken. The problem of juvenile crime should be stopped at its source, not nudged in the shoulder by curfews. There have been numerous attempts to combat juvenile crime through positive means and many have been successful. In 1936, the Police Athletic League (PAL) was founded in New York City. PAL worked effectively to give teens a positive alternative to juvenile crime. In 1953 Boys and Girls Clubs of America are established. These offer social, educational, career and leadership programs to disadvantaged youths. In 1974 the Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act established the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) which gave funds to states to take on juvenile crime. With more  funding and proper management of funds, more programs could be created and those that exist could be expanded and improved. According to the article, Many say that after-school programs and organized sports leagues work to reduce crime. Alfred Blumstein, a leading criminologist, says that curfews must be augmented by community centers. However, teen curfews could be eliminated all together with the expansion of better, more effective solutions. In conclusion, juvenile crime is a pressing matter that demands action. However, the rectification of the problem must not include teen curfews. Curfews infringe on the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and are ineffective. Other solutions are much better, more effective, and eliminate the need for curfews.

Chinese Economic Reform :: Economics Economy China Essays

Chinese Economic Reform Two years after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, it became apparent to many of China's leaders that economic reform was necessary. During his tenure as China's premier, Mao had encouraged social movements such as the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution" which had had as their bases ideas such as serving the people and maintaining the class struggle. By 1978, China’s leaders were searching for a solution to serious economic problems. Hua Guofeng, the man who had succeeded Mao Zedong as CCP (Chinese Communist Party) leader after Mao's death, had demonstrated a desire to continue the ideologically based movements of Mao. Unfortunately, these movements had left China in a state where agriculture was stagnant, industrial production was low, and the people's living standards had not increased in twenty years (Nathan 200). While the gross output value of industry and agriculture increased by 810 percent and national income grew by 420 percent [between 1952 and 1980] ... average individual income increased by only 100 percent (Shirk 28). However, attempts at economic reform in China were not solely due to generosity on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to increase living standards. It had become clear to members of the CCP that economic reform would fulfill a political purpose as well since the party felt that it had suffered a loss of support. (Shirk 23) This movement "from virtue to competence" seemed to mark a serious departure from orthodox Chinese political theory. Confucius himself had said that those individuals who best demonstrated what he referred to as moral force should lead the nation. Using this principle as a guide, China had for centuries attempted to choose its leaders by administering a test to determine their moral force. After the Communist takeover of the country, Mao continued this emphasis on moral force by demanding that Chinese citizens demonstrate what he referred to as "correct consciousness." This correct consciousness could be exhibited by the way people lived. Thus, by demonstrating their expertise in a more practical area of competence, the leaders of the CCP felt they could demonstrate how they were serving the people. Economic reform came about as a result of an attempt by CCP leaders to demonstrate, in a more practical way than Mao had done, their moral force. Chinese Economic Reform :: Economics Economy China Essays Chinese Economic Reform Two years after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, it became apparent to many of China's leaders that economic reform was necessary. During his tenure as China's premier, Mao had encouraged social movements such as the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution" which had had as their bases ideas such as serving the people and maintaining the class struggle. By 1978, China’s leaders were searching for a solution to serious economic problems. Hua Guofeng, the man who had succeeded Mao Zedong as CCP (Chinese Communist Party) leader after Mao's death, had demonstrated a desire to continue the ideologically based movements of Mao. Unfortunately, these movements had left China in a state where agriculture was stagnant, industrial production was low, and the people's living standards had not increased in twenty years (Nathan 200). While the gross output value of industry and agriculture increased by 810 percent and national income grew by 420 percent [between 1952 and 1980] ... average individual income increased by only 100 percent (Shirk 28). However, attempts at economic reform in China were not solely due to generosity on the part of the Chinese Communist Party to increase living standards. It had become clear to members of the CCP that economic reform would fulfill a political purpose as well since the party felt that it had suffered a loss of support. (Shirk 23) This movement "from virtue to competence" seemed to mark a serious departure from orthodox Chinese political theory. Confucius himself had said that those individuals who best demonstrated what he referred to as moral force should lead the nation. Using this principle as a guide, China had for centuries attempted to choose its leaders by administering a test to determine their moral force. After the Communist takeover of the country, Mao continued this emphasis on moral force by demanding that Chinese citizens demonstrate what he referred to as "correct consciousness." This correct consciousness could be exhibited by the way people lived. Thus, by demonstrating their expertise in a more practical area of competence, the leaders of the CCP felt they could demonstrate how they were serving the people. Economic reform came about as a result of an attempt by CCP leaders to demonstrate, in a more practical way than Mao had done, their moral force.

Essay on Human Behaviour and Social Norms

Running head: HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND SOCIAL NORMS Do social norms influence human behaviour? Human behaviour is the response to given stimuli, which are socially and environmentally affected. This response is something that can easily be influenced and shaped through many personal, situational, social, biological, mental factors. In this essay the case of social norms influencing human behaviour will be analyzed using previous studies. Social norms are part of a larger influential scale generally named as social influence.Social influence is the exercise of power that an individual or a group can use on other individuals or society in order to alter their attitudes, behaviours and lead them to a desired direction. Social influence has as an outcome three different behavioural patterns, which are conformity, compliance and obedience. All of them will be discussed, but especially conformity and compliance, which mainly include the influence of social norms on behaviour (Franzoi, 2009; Cia ldini & Goldstein, 2004).Firstly, conformity in general is the action to adapt with the behaviour of the rest of the people due to perceived group pressure. Practically, this means that the way people dress, entertain themselves, protest, work, eat, go on vacations, disclose themselves and substantially anything an individual can occupy himself, is formed by group’s direction and tendencies because the majority of people, if not all of them, try to socialize and be accepted by their society in any possible way.This phenomenon is called conformity and it is an ambiguous question if independence, which indeed is a reality, exists anyway. This happens because people voluntarily direct their independence towards society’s preferences and tendencies in order to feel that they belong somewhere and they have a particular social identity (Franzoi, 2009). The second factor of influence is the compliance and it is has to do with the public and clear acceptance of one’s pe rson to act according to given social direction by the indicated social power. However, compliance can be divided into internal and external.This means that a person can comply with a situation either because someone else indirectly forces him or either because he believes he should act like this. For example, if someone asks his friend to lie in order not to have problems with parents (e. g. cover a sneaking out) but he does it in the name of friendship even if he does not really want it, this is a clear example of external force making you to comply. Internal compliance is the opposite state where personal beliefs and attitudes force you to do something without having any external pressure to do something.This issue is very important because in the case of external compliance, social norms are in a great influential position in contrast to internal compliance where personal beliefs mainly take place on the decisional process (Franzoi, 2009). On the other hand obedience is the tota l performance of a given order by social power without any resistance against it or trial to sustain independence. Social power is the available social sources through social acceptance and social status that a person or a group of people can have in order to exercise persuasion and give motivation to make people change or fulfill their requests.Consequently, these three parts of social influence represents the levels of personal accordance to social patterns, authoritarian or not. Specifically, it can be noticed that the level of individual’s independence sets if a situation is more about conformity (unconscious but voluntary acceptance of the norms), or compliance (internal or external acceptance) or obedience (total accordance to social power) (Cook et al. , as cited in Franzoi, 2009; Franzoi, 2009). Focusing more one the aspect of conformity and the influence of social norms, there are specific factors that affect conformity and levels of social norms’ influence on it.These factors can be situational, personal and cultural. Situational factors can be group size, group cohesiveness, and social support. Group size is important because as Asch (1955) found, the larger the group, the bigger the phenomenon of conformity due to social norms. Group cohesiveness makes the group to have greater bonds due to similarity and ability to easily show empathy to each other (Christensen et al. , 2004) and social support is noticed to groups with higher levels of cohesiveness and bonding. On the other hand, there are personal factors ffecting the type of conformity such as self-awareness (ability to understand own self), self-presentation (try to present ideal self in order to conform), personal control (desire to feel that one has control, as a human right, over particular situations) and gender (gender differences- women are more likely to conform) (Franzoi, 2009). Based on all the previously referred material, conformity is totally driven by social norms, n orms that are not written but sometimes are more powerful than law; the way that a person conforms to society affects the level and type of his compliance to society’s requests.For example, if a person has as personal characteristic not to like altering his self-image/ presentation based on society’s preferences due to his intense belief in independence, it is possible that this person will comply more difficult because of external motivation instead of internal. On the other hand, this means that if a person has an internal compliance only to smile to people who knows and not to anybody else due to his belief, this will affect the way that he conforms to the social norm of smiling to people in general in order to be kind.This shows how social norms can affect conformity and consequently compliance and the other way around, respectively. Furthermore, people have a tendency to create and maintain meaningful relationships with other people because they need socializing a s human beings, which is called as affiliation. Affiliation is a good example of internal compliance. This motivation makes the compliance to socializing and dedicating energy and time on building relationships, an internal acceptance for personal growth (Franzoi, 2009; Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004).Nevertheless, there is the issue of how and when external compliance to social norms such as stereotyping occurs. In particular, Bargh and Chartrand (1999) did a study on automaticity of behaviour and found that when people are unconsciously pre-occupied with e. g. stereotyping words, even if they believe that stereotyping is wrong, they are likely to stereotype because they unconsciously externally comply with the given stimuli. Stereotyping is a form of social norm. People may stereotype in order to protect themselves; for example, filthy aggressive people on the street may be perceived as thieves or criminals.So there are two outcomes on this example. One person may believe that the app earance cannot indicate anything about personal characteristics but in the end he conforms to the social norm and try to avoid him as the other people around him do (external compliance). On the other hand, one may truly believe that these kinds of people are definitely criminals because he might have a bad experience in the past so he avoids him due to his belief (internal compliance to the social norm of avoiding this kind of people) (Franzoi, 2009; Cialdini & Goldstein, 2004; Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).Rimal and Real (2005) did a study on how perceived norms affect human behaviour with college students in order to investigate intentions to alcohol consumption. They proposed the theory of normative social behaviour that includes three mechanisms: injunctive norms (such as social approval), outcome expectations (such as personal benefits) and group identity (such as similarity). Their hypothesis was that these three mechanisms are able to moderate the influence of social norms on the human behaviour. Indeed, their results showed that these normative mechanisms could predict the intention of alcohol consumption to college students.Consequently, this study is a clear answer to the question whether social norms affect human behaviour. In addition, Rivis and Sheeran (2003) did a study on Theory of planned behaviour in order to find out whether added descriptive norms can be good predictors of human behaviour in the particular model. Their results showed that younger participants and health risk behaviours are greatly related to stronger correlation between intentions of behaviour and descriptive norms; confirming that behaviour is affected by norms.As a conclusion, the general point of view in all these theories and facts is that social norms affect human behaviour through the state of conformity and compliance. Substantially, the intentions of behaviour can be affected either implicitly or explicitly. People conform to the society in order to be accepted and compl y with various social norms that conformity requires through implicit/internal or explicit/external way. Even if personal and situational factors may influence the level of compliance and conformity, people constantly comply with various requests either due to personal beliefs or due to accepting other’s personal beliefs.Word count: 1. 440 References Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and social pressure. Scientific American, 31-35. Bargh, J. A. , & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479. Christensen, P. N. , & Rothberger, H. , & Wood, W. , & Maltz, D. C. (2004). Social norms and identity relevance: A motivational approach to normative behaviour. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 30, 1295-1309. Cialdini, R. B. , & Goldstein, N. J. (2004).Social influence: Compliance and conformity. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 591-621. Franzoi, S. L. (2009). Social psychology (5th ed. ). New York: McGraw-Hill. Rimal, R. N. , & Real, K. (2005). How behaviours are influenced by perceived norms: A test of the theory of normative social behaviour. Communication Research, 32, 389-414. Rivis, A. , & Sheeran, P. (2003). Descriptive norms as an additional predictor in the theory of planned behaviour: A meta-analysis. Current psychology, 22, 218-233.

Digital Citizenship and Information Technology - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 2 Words: 675 Downloads: 4 Date added: 2019/04/15 Category Society Essay Level High school Tags: Citizenship Essay Did you like this example? It is an unsophisticated fact that once information has been put into the digital world, it is public and permanent, whether you believe it or not. Free and low-cost digital tools allow students to create/write blogs, share their photos and artwork on social media, design videos and grow a YouTube following, and participate in projects with peers around the world. The articles used in this essay are Info graphic: Citizenship in the digital age by: Diana Fingal, Plugged in parents by: Common sense media, Are you practicing ethical digital citizenship? by: Rashmi. The online world has many good advantages and bad risks. A good digital citizen will make sure to think about what they post online and keep away from creepy sounding people. Be safe. Being safe online is a whole topic, much different from being a good digital citizen†and with much different ramifications. Its crucial not divulge any personal information, passwords, addresses, etc. with someone you dont know. For more detailed information on Internet safety tips, read our blog post about keeping kids safe online. Dont say anything online you wouldnt say to someones face. An online comment can be even more hurtful than a face-to-face insult, because once something is written the person can read it repeatedly. Sometimes, we find it easier to reply with negative comments when the person is not right in front of you and you can hide behind your computer or smartphone. Dont be tempted; think twice about what you are saying before you post or send, and ask yourself, Would I say this to someone if they were standing in front of me? Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Digital Citizenship and Information Technology" essay for you Create order Treat others the way you want to be treated. This sounds basic, but its probably the one piece of digital etiquette advice that is broken the most. Keep your comments positive; be truthful, and polite. If you want to go the extra mile, acknowledge when someone has been helpful; thank them, and pay it forward! Dont share anything you dont own, without permission. All content was created by someone, and that person owned their content. This includes articles (and ANY portion of articles), photos, memes, reports, blogs, and anything else online that wasnt created by you. Be aware of copyright laws, ask permission before you share, and be sure to give credit if you reuse or re-post an article or picture you didnt create. Know the rules. Whether youre using classroom forums, Twitter, Facebook, or other sites, know the sites rules and guidelines†and follow them. Each community creates their own rules that they expect users to follow, which can usually be found in the Site Rules or Ab out Us section. Dont believe everything you read. Not everything online is true. In fact, theres a lot online thats not true. Before believing (or sharing!), dig deeper. Search for facts. Just because its written online doesnt mean its true. Be vigilant. If you saw something happen in real life where someone could be harmed, youd call for help, right? If you see something online that may be harmful to someone else, report it to the sites authorities, or an adult you trust. With cyber bullying and online predators, we cannot be too careful these days, and we all need to look out for each other. Be vigilant. If you saw something happen in real life where someone could be harmed, youd call for help, right? If you see something online that may be harmful to someone else, report it to the sites authorities or an adult you trust. With cyberbullying and online predators, we cannot be too careful these days, and we all need to look out for each other. Being safe in the digital world is very important, it can follow you for the rest of your life. I have learned to not make myself a bad digital footprint and post anything I would regret later and to treat people how you would want to be treated. My online behavior will change, and I will now watch what I post and say online.