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It being not only possible but even easy to predict which ten-year-old boys are at greatest risk of growing up to be persistent offenders, what are we doing with the information? Just about the last thing that we should do is to wait until their troubles have escalated in adolescence and then attack them with the provisions of the new Criminal Justice Bill. If this bill becomes law, magistrates will have the power to impose residential care orders. More young people will be drawn into institutional life when all the evidence shows that this worsens rather than improves their prospects. The introduction of short sharp shocks in detention centers will simply give more young people a taste of something else they dont need; the whole regime of detention centers is one of toughening delinquents, and if you want to train someone to be anti-establishment, I cant think of a better way to do it, says the writer of this report. The Cambridge Institute of Criminology comes up with five key factors that are likely to make for delinquency: a low income family a large family, parents deemed by social workers to be bad at raising children, parents who themselves have a criminal record, and low intelligence in the child. Not surprisingly, the factors tend to overlap. Of the 63 boys in the sample who had at least three of them when they were ten, half became juvenile delinquentscompared with only a fifth of the sample as a whole. | 
