“We are doing the same thing as all of you. "Except when we do it, it's, 'Oh, my God, these kids are animals!' "Like it's the end of the world coming." --Namond, HBO's The WireYoung black men are taking over the corners of Baltimore. They're all tough-talking, hard-jawed, and crisp white t-shirts, as big as sails, attached. A precocious boy witnesses a shootout near a drug lord's hideout and takes sticks to play guns and robbers. His trajectory is as follows: he passes sticks and balloons. from piss, to g-packs and real guns, to taunting cops with brown bags of excrement, to house cats and lighter fluid, to bold, cold-blooded murder In the words of the reformer. social Charles Loring Brace, this boy belongs to the dangerous class: an undisciplined and delinquent youth Creation of David Simon for the HBO detective series, The Wire, Kenard's character may be fictional, but his presence adds to the realism. much praised by the series. There really are young boys like Kenard who exist on the streets of American cities and who fall into the easy and familiar trap of the pharmaceutical industry. The Wire makes a point of following in the footsteps of Baltimore's youth throughout its five seasons, introducing the theme of juvenile delinquency to the considerable range of social issues tackled by the series. The Wire almost perfectly depicts the factors that cause a young person to “defect” – from the failures of the city school district, a difficult home life or struggling with homelessness, to the surrounding environmental influences that arise from life in the city of Baltimore. However, while The Wire and its examination of causality does a great deal for the juvenile delinquency debate as a whole - taking the conversation to levels that no other scripted television has ever seen...... middle of paper. ..... there are many more unsupervised children concentrated in a small area. This is when juvenile delinquency becomes a class issue rather than a crime issue. Charles Loring Brace, 19th-century philanthropist and founder of the Children's Aid Society, introduced the concept of "dangerous classes" into the debate on juvenile delinquency. In his book The Dangerous Classes of New York City, an examination of New York's young, poor and unwanted underclass. Brace's dangerous classes, including vagrants, derelicts, predators, wanderers, and prostitutes. Brace presents a new vernacular in reference to offenders similar to that used today: "depraved", wicked, "viscid" and "reckless". Works Cited HBO's The Wire New York's Dangerous Classrooms by Charles Loring Brace Donald J. Cordonnier