Governing Serious Offenders

Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders

One approach to identifying gaps in knowledge about serious and violent juvenile (SVJ) offenders is to focus on "missing information" in the empirical literature. It would be quite easy, in fact, to compile a long list of research questions covering a diverse set of topics. This is an important task that is necessary in recommending future research priorities. However, I propose that future res...

Victim-choice polymorphia among serious sex offenders.

The victim-choice polymorphia of 178 sexual aggressors divided into six subtypes, incest offenders, pseudoincest offenders, sexual aggressors of familiar children, sexual aggressors of unfamiliar children, sexual aggressors of familiar women, and sexual aggressors of unfamiliar women, was compared. Results showed that sex offenders remained stable in their choice of victim from one offence to a...

What works for serious juvenile offenders? A systematic review.

This study examines the outcomes of best available empirical research regarding the effectiveness of treatment programs implemented in secure corrections to prevent the recidivism of serious (violent and chronic) juvenile offenders (from 12 to 21 years old). In this review 30 experimental and quasi-experimental studies are analyzed, comparing 2831 juveniles in the treatment groups and 3002 yout...

Interrogations, confessions, and guilty pleas among serious adolescent offenders.

In the present study, we examined (a) the prevalence and characteristics of youths' true and false admissions (confessions and guilty pleas), (b) youths' interrogation experiences with police and lawyers, and (c) whether youths' interrogation experiences serve as situational risk factors for true and false admissions. We interviewed 193 14- to 17-year-old males (M = 16.4) incarcerated for serio...

Applying Neural Networks to the classification of serious offenders