Implementing a large, longitudinal study of any sample is a major undertaking. The challenges are compounded when the study involves multiple sites and a high-risk sample. This article outlines the methodology for the Pathways to Desistance study, a multisite, longitudinal study of serious juvenile offenders, and discusses the key operational decisions with the greatest impact on the study design.

Approximately 100,000 youths are currently incarcerated in the US, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on adult r...

This bulletin presents findings from the Pathways to Desistance study about the effects of transfer from juvenile court to adult court on a sample of serious adolescent offenders in Maricopa County, AZ. The authors compare the extant literature with findings from the Pathways study and discuss the possible implications of these findings for future changes in transfer statutes. Following are som...

Approximately 100,000 youths are currently incarcerated in the US, yet little is known whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior. This paper uses the incarceration tendency of randomly-assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on adult r...

Beginning in the 1980s, many States passed legal reforms designed to get tough on juvenile crime. One important reform was the revision of transfer (also called waiver or certification) laws (Grif­ fin, 2003) to expand the types of offenses and offenders eligible for transfer from the juvenile court for trial and sentencing in the adult criminal court.1 These reforms lowered the minimum age for...

The recently enacted Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act will expand and standardize the registration of adolescent sex offenders. To evaluate the effectiveness of this and similar legislation, the authors assessed 91 juvenile males who had been adjudicated for a sexual felony offense and 174 juvenile males who had no history of sexual offending with several risk measures. On admission t...

Self-report measures of psychosocial maturity and screening measures of achievement and intelligence (Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence; WASI) were used to investigate the influence of psychosocial maturity on male juvenile offenders' comprehension and appreciation of the Miranda warning (Grisso's Instruments for Assessing Understanding and Appreciation of Miranda Rights; GUAM). A samp...

During the 1990s and 2000s, nearly every state revised its laws or adopted new legislation facilitating the transfer of juvenile offenders from juvenile court to criminal court. Previously, transfer was reserved for the “worst juveniles”, or those youths who were charged with serious violent offenses. This paper compares and contrasts girls and boys who were judicially waived to adult court in ...

BACKGROUND Injury is a major cause of mortality and morbidity of young people and the cost-effectiveness of many injury prevention programs remains uncertain. This study aimed to analyze the costs and benefits of an injury awareness education program, the P.A.R.T.Y. (Prevent Alcohol and Risk-related Trauma in Youth) program, for juvenile justice offenders in Western Australia. METHODS Costs a...

VOL. 18 / NO. 2 / FALL 2008 3 American juvenile justice policy is in a period of transition. After a decade of declining juvenile crime rates, the moral panic that fueled the “get-tough” reforms of the 1990s and early 2000s—reforms that eroded the boundaries between juvenile and criminal court and exposed juvenile offenders to increasingly harsh punishments —has waned. State legislatures across...