Movies chronicling the phenomenology of juvenile delinquency have been produced since the 1930s. These films have become part of American culture and are at once a representation of and possible etiologic factor in causing delinquency. This paper reviews aspects of the epidemiology and criminology of delinquency and how they have been reflected in American films. Movies of historical and sociop...

Growing public concern about the rise in violent juvenile crime is borne out by increases in the juvenile court's caseload, which rose 23% between 1989 and 1993. The number of cases involving person offenses increased by 52%. Despite the rise in person offenses, the majority of delinquency cases in juvenile court involve property offenses, and less than 10% of the caseload consists of violent o...

This article considers the origins of the juvenile court and the degree to which developmental life-course (DLC) criminology might inform aspects of juvenile justice policy and practice. We discuss the foundations of the juvenile court in developmental science and also consider insights on delinquency from similar contemporary traditions. From there, the article provides a sense of what the juv...

As an alternative to traditional juvenile courts, juvenile drug courts attempt to provide substance abuse treatment, sanctions, and incentives to rehabilitate nonviolent drug-involved youth, empower families to support them in this process, and prevent recidivism. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) sponsored a multisite study of juvenile drug courts to examine the...

Ecological approaches to explaining juvenile delinquency emphasize the importance of spatial influences on patterns of delinquency. Studies of recidivism among juvenile offenders, on the other hand, have rarely taken neighborhood influences into account. Moreover, conventional statistical approaches adapted for investigating spatial neighborhood effects, such as hierarchical linear modeling (HL...