Murders and non-negligent manslaughter rates jumped 128 percent, aggravated assault 95 percent, and rape 25 percent. The philosophy underlying expungement legislation can be traced to what is known as the Chicago School of Criminology, which, during the 1920s and '30s, championed environmental explanations of criminality. Strain theory viewed delinquency as arising from the frustration felt by individuals who were unable to achieve culturally defined goals because they were denied the institutionalized means of doing so. Hence, the only way to rehabilitate juvenile delinquents is to send them into adulthood with this label detached. The answer is no.
Delinquents are substantially different from non- delinquents.
Research suggests that delinquents are more defiant, ambivalent about authority, emotionally unstable, extroverted, fearful of failure, resentful, hostile, suspicious, and defensive than non- delinquents. John Monahan, in his 1981 book Predicting Violent Behavior , has found that individuals with juvenile records are four times more likely to become adult offenders. Those figures do not even begin to approximate the actual criminal histories of those individuals, since being arrested is itself a highly atypical consequence of violating the law. It is also worth noting that those figures would be even higher if juvenile expungement statutes did not artificially deflate them. In fact, expungement statutes also make it virtually impossible to collect the kind of data that might lead to more effective crime prevention.