The development of gender-specific programming is gaining attention as the approach that most effectively addresses the needs of female youthful offenders. This study provides a profile of female juvenile offenders, their problems and needs, and suggests psychoeducational approaches for building coping skills to reduce cycles of domestic violence. This is particularly important within a system ...

OBJECTIVE Family-based treatment models that have shown effectiveness with juvenile offenders may also lead to reduced criminality in siblings of those offenders. However, the lasting effects of such treatments on siblings have not been evaluated. In the present study, the authors examined criminal outcomes for siblings of serious and violent juvenile offenders who had participated on average 2...

Progressive reformers envisioned a therapeutic juvenile court that made individualized treatment decisions in the child's "best interests." The Supreme Court's Gault decision provided the impetus for transforming the juvenile court from an informal welfare agency into a scaled-down criminal court. Since Gault, the juvenile court procedures increasingly resemble those of adult courts, although i...

Sparked by high-profile cases involving children who commit violent crimes, public concerns regarding child delinquents have escalated. Compared with juveniles whose delinquent behavior begins later in adolescence, child delinquents (offenders younger than age 13) face a greater risk of becoming serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders. OJJDP formed the Study Group on Very Young Offende...

ABSTRACT A number of unpublished technical reports claim that drug courts have been more successful than other forms of community supervision in closely supervising drug offenders in the community through frequent monitoring and close supervision, including mandatory frequent drug testing, placing and retaining drug offenders in treatment programs, providing treatment and related services to of...

Juvenile justice systems have widely adopted risk assessment instruments to support judicial and administrative decisions about sanctioning severity and restrictiveness of care. A little explored property of these instruments is the extent to which their predictive validity generalizes across gender. The article reports on a meta-analysis of risk assessment predictive validity with male and fem...

..................................................................................................................................... ix Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 1 Delinquency in Adolescence ...........................................................................................

Although youth who commit serious violent crimes are small in number, they account for a disproportionate amount of juvenile crime. How then can we best intervene with this difficult—even dangerous—population? A major study, funded by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and conducted by its Study Group on Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders, sheds new light on promising...

The Institute’s recent work on adult male offenders has found that the most serious and persistent adult offenders had been detained as a juvenile (see Trends & issues no 267). In terms of crime reduction, interventions that focus on reducing the likelihood of juveniles escalating to adult offenders will have significant benefits for the whole of the Australian community. Research conducted in ...

Rising juvenile crime rates during the 1970s and 1980s spurred state legislatures across the country to exclude or transfer a significant share of offenders under the age of eighteen to the jurisdiction of the criminal court, essentially redrawing the boundary between the juvenile and adult justice systems. Jeffrey Fagan examines the legal architecture of the new boundary-drawing regime and how...