OBJECTIVE Although studies reveal substantial mental health treatment needs among youths in the juvenile justice system, far less is known about young offenders transferred to adult criminal court. This statewide study examined the mental health needs of young offenders who committed serious crimes and were transferred to adult court and subsequently incarcerated in a prison for adults. METHO...

Although evidence indicates that both psychopathy and intelligence independently predict juvenile offending, relations among IQ, psychopathy, and offending are inconsistent. We investigated whether intelligence moderates the relation between psychopathy and both income and aggressive offending concurrently and over time among 1,354 juvenile offenders enrolled in Pathways to Desistance, a prospe...

BACKGROUND Little is known about the institutional behaviour of incarcerated sex offenders. AIM To study the relationships between juvenile sex offending, thought psychopathology and institutional misconduct. METHOD We applied negative binomial regression and Area Under Curve Receiver Operating Characteristic (AUC-ROC) analyses to self-report and records data from institutionalised delinque...

Juvenile drug court (JDC) programs have expanded rapidly over the past twenty years and are an increasingly popular option for rehabilitating juvenile offenders with substance use problems. Given the high cost of crime to society, an important economic question is whether and to what extent JDC programs reduce criminal activity among juvenile offenders. To address this question, the present stu...

Youth courts provide an efficient—albeit unconventional—alternative to the formal juvenile justice system. Although structures of youth courts vary, the purpose remains the same: to rehabilitate and deter youth offenders in a forum largely governed by their minor peers—one free of the stigma associated with the traditional justice system. This Note examines the expansion of youth courts; variou...

This article describes trends in child pornography (CP) possession cases that ended in arrest in 2000 and in 2006, using data from the National Juvenile Online Victimization Study, a two-wave longitudinal survey of a national sample of more than 2,500 U.S. law enforcement agencies. In 2006, there were an estimated 3,672 arrests for CP possession, compared with 1,713 arrests in 2000. Many charac...

Despite broad consensus that most juvenile crimes are committed with peers, many questions regarding developmental and individual differences in criminal style (i.e., co-offending vs. solo offending) remain unanswered. Using prospective 3-year longitudinal data from 937 14- to 17-year-old serious male offenders, the present study investigates whether youths tend to offend alone, in groups, or a...