Social ecological theories and decades of supporting research suggest that contexts exert a powerful influence on adolescent delinquency. Individual traits, such as impulse control, also pose a developmental disadvantage to adolescents through increasing risk of delinquency. However, such individual differences may also predispose some youth to struggle more in adverse environments, but also to...

This review considers juvenile delinquency and justice from an international perspective. Youth crime is a growing concern. Many young offenders are also victims with complex needs, leading to a public health approach that requires a balance of welfare and justice models. However, around the world there are variable and inadequate legal frameworks and a lack of a specialist workforce. The UK an...

The aim of this study was to examine which of the two personality models, PEN or Big Five, differentiates best between Dutch juvenile offenders (n = 96) and college students (n = 204), between Dutch selfreported recidivists (n = 43) and non-recidivists (n = 14), and between officially recorded recidivists (n = 37) and non-recidivists (n = 24). Students (mean age = 17.23 years) and offenders (me...

Research findings indicate that there are multiple causal pathways to delinquency. A multicomponent model of delinquency was developed to explore systematically the interrelationships of psychosocial variables and their relationships to delinquent behaviour. Most importantly, alienation was tested for its ability to act as a core mediating predictor variable. One hundred and fifty-two adolescen...

This paper presents an analysis of mortgage delinquency between 2004 and 2008 using a loan-level data set from a major national mortgage bank. Our analysis highlights two problems underlying the mortgage crisis: a reliance on mortgage brokers who tend to originate lowerquality loans and a prevalence of low-documentation loans—known in the industry as ‘‘liar’s loans’’—that result in borrower inf...