The rehabilitation potential of mentally ill juvenile offenders should be at the forefront of the forensic mental health debate, because these youths mature into adults who may continue to have mental disorders and to offend. In view of this concern, the importance of using juvenile detention facilities as vehicles for youth reform cannot be overstated. Juvenile justice reform is a relatively r...

Identifying and addressing the predictors of youth violence at appropriate points in youth development is important for prevention. Unfortunately, there have been few high-quality longitudinal studies of the predictors of youth violence. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP’s) Study Group on Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders (Study Group) brought 22 researcher...

BACKGROUND Children with antisocial behaviour show deficits in the perception of emotional expressions in others that may contribute to the development and persistence of antisocial and aggressive behaviour. Current treatments for antisocial youngsters are limited in effectiveness. It has been argued that more attention should be devoted to interventions that target neuropsychological correlate...

Although the dispositional options for delinquent youths have diversified over the past 20 years, the debate about the most effective treatment of young offenders continues. This article reviews the existing evaluations of various juvenile corrections alternatives. In contrast to the conclusions of scholars in the late 1970s that "nothing worked" in juvenile corrections, Mark Lipsey's 1992 meta...

Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg explore the dramatic changes in the law's conception of young offenders between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. At the dawn of the juvenile court era, they note, most youths were tried and punished as if they were adults. Early juvenile court reformers argued strongly against such a view, believing that the justice ...

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...

In the last decade, a number of states have expanded the jurisdiction of their juvenile courts by increasing the maximum age of jurisdiction to eighteen. Proponents argue that these expansions reduce crime by increasing access to the beneficial features of the juvenile justice system. Critics counter that these expansions risk increasing crime by reducing deterrence. In 2010, Illinois raised th...

Juvenile justice systems make use of many programs intended to reduce the recidivism of the juvenile offenders with whom they interact. Not all such programs are effective and one of the more progressive reforms of recent years has been the movement toward programs validated by research evidence. Three ways to define evidence-based programs are described, with a focus on a relatively unfamiliar...

The authors systematically evaluated a selected population of juvenile offenders for the prevalence of affective disorders. Seventy-one (40 male, 31 female) serious juvenile offenders were interviewed using the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia (SADS). They were then diagnosed using the Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC) and the DSM-III. The Hamilton Rating Scales (HRS), Carrol...