The mediators of favorable multisystemic therapy (MST) outcomes achieved at 12 months postrecruitment were examined within the context of a randomized effectiveness trial with 127 juvenile sexual offenders and their caregivers. Outcome measures assessed youth delinquency, substance use, externalizing symptoms, and deviant sexual interest/risk behaviors; hypothesized mediators included measures ...

The problems associated with violence during adolescence have been on the rise in recent decades. Many studies have focused only on environmental causes or individual causes of violence, although a combination of both variables would seem to be the best option for prediction. The current study aims to assess the relevance of individual characteristics (personality traits, intelligence, and hist...

are most delinquent offenses committed in groups but that most lone offenders are influenced by companions.’ Somewhat later, Shaw and Meyer2 and Shaw and 11cKay3 estimated the extent to which juvenile delinquency is group activity, showing that less than 20 percent are lone offenders in juvenile court samples. Shaw and 1~’IcKay also showed that the modal size of offending groups is two and thre...

Juvenile offenders with substance use problems are at high risk for deleterious long-term outcomes. This study evaluated the capacity of a promising vocational and employment training program in the building sector (i.e., Community Restitution Apprenticeship-Focused Training, CRAFT) to mitigate such outcomes through enhanced employment and education. Participants were 97 high-risk juvenile offe...

Probation officers exercise substantial discretion in their daily work with troubled and troubling juvenile offenders. In this experiment, we examine the effect of psychopathic features, child abuse, and ethnicity on 204 officers' expectancies of, recommendations for, and approach to supervising, juvenile offenders. The results indicate that officers (a) have decision-making and supervision app...

We investigated whether and how a juvenile's history of experiencing sexual abuse affects public perceptions of juvenile sex offenders in a series of 5 studies. When asked about juvenile sex offenders in an abstract manner (Studies 1 and 2), the more participants (community members and undergraduates) believed that a history of being sexually abused as a child causes later sexually abusive beha...

Juvenile offenders are at risk for involvement in both fighting behavior and peer victimization. Understanding the potential causal mechanisms leading to these outcomes is important to address the needs of this population. The present study tested four mediator models of violent perpetration and peer victimization in a sample of 112 incarcerated youth (68 males and 44 females). In the models, t...

The objective of the present study was to compare incarcerated male and female juvenile offenders regarding psychopathic traits, behavior problems, psychopathy taxon, conduct disorder, self-reported delinquent behavior, and crime seriousness. Within a total forensic sample of 261 detainee participants, subdivided in a male group (n=217) and a female group (n=44), statistically significant diffe...

Pathways to Desistance How and why do many serious adolescent offenders stop offending while others continue to commit crimes? This series of bulletins presents findings from the Pathways to Desistance Study, a multidisciplinary investigation that attempts to answer this question. Investigators interviewed 1,354 young offenders from Philadelphia and Phoenix for 7 years after their convictions t...

Laurie Chassin focuses on the elevated prevalence of substance use disorders among young offenders in the juvenile justice system and on efforts by the justice system to provide treatment for these disorders. She emphasizes the importance of diagnosing and treating these disorders, which are linked both with continued offending and with a broad range of negative effects, such as smoking, risky ...