There has been some disagreement among delinquency experts on what leads youngsters to become delinquent and how to deal with it. One longstanding approach is to see delinquent youth as a subculture within and responding to the deviant communities of the country with equally deviant values and mores. Another approach sees delinquency as the result of inadequate or ineffective social controls and poor socialization. The deviant subculture approach places the onus on the community for bringing up its young with a distorted or deviant set of values, while social control theorists fault communities for improper socialization which leads young people to nonconformity with any set of values or norms. What is striking is not so much the difference between these approaches, but the emphasis on environmental risk factors rather than on individual maladjustment or failure.
Life chances are also a function of teenagers' social environment.
While white youths have three times as many chances of being killed in a motor vehicle accident than do minority youth, the risk of death by homicide is four times as great for the minority youth. White males are six times more likely to commit suicide than are African American females. Problems of drug abuse also differ according to residence in urban or suburban settings and socioeconomic status. Despite an overall decline in drug use, it still presents a major risk factor which again is greater for those in poverty. The reasons they give for abusing drugs also differ.