Short-term trends in crime and delinquency: A comparison of UCR,NCS, and self-report data

This study examines short-term (five- to ten-year) trends in crime and juvenile delinquency using FBI Uniform Crime Reports data on arrests and offenses known to the police, National Crime Survey data on victimization, and National Youth Survey data on self-reported delinquency. The focus is on FBI Index offenses, but less serious offenses are also considered. FBI statistics indicate generally increasing rates of crime, while NCS and NYS data indicate stable and occasionally decreasing rates. Data on the self-reported incidence of delinquency are more compatible with arrest data than are data on the self-reported prevalence of delinquency, but the two self-report measures are more compatible with one another than with arrest data. Attempts to reconcile official statistics with victimization surveys and self-report studies seem unlikely to overcome the differences among the sources when trends in crime, rather than rates of crime at a single time, are considered.     

MARKETIZED MENTALITY,COMPETITIVE/EGOISTIC SCHOOL CULTURE,AND DELINQUENT ATTITUDES AND BEHAVIOR: AN APPLICATION OF INSTITUTIONAL ANOMIE THEORY*

We analyze the individual‐level and school‐level determinants of delinquency through the lens of a macro‐sociological theory of crime—institutional anomie theory (IAT). The concept of a “marketized mentality” is introduced as a predictor of students’ delinquency, along with an egoistic/competitive school culture—a feature of the school community. Five hypotheses pertaining to the readiness to use violence and self‐reported delinquency were assessed using multilevel modeling with data from a survey in Germany for 4,150 students clustered in 69 schools. The results largely meet theoretical expectations. The measure of marketized mentality exhibits robust relationships with both forms of delinquency at the individual level, and an egoistic/competitive school culture helps explain variation in levels of these forms of delinquency across schools. Also consistent with expectations, the anti‐social effects of marketized mentality are accentuated for both the readiness to use violence and committing instrumentally motivated property offenses as a competitive/egoistic school climate increases. The results of our analyses reveal that bringing in concepts of IAT can appreciably enhance understanding of the characteristics of students and features of communal school organization that are conducive to youthful offending.     

COMPARING DELINQUENCY CAREERS IN COURT RECORDS AND SELF‐REPORTS*

Most knowledge about delinquency careers is derived from official records. The main aim of this paper is to compare conclusions about delinquency careers derived from court referrals with conclusions derived from self‐reports. Data are analyzed from the Seattle Social Development Project, which is a prospective longitudinal survey of 808 youths. Annual court and self‐report data were available from age 11 to age 17 for eight offenses. The prevalence of offending increased with age, in both court referrals and self‐reports. There was a sharp increase in the prevalence of court referrals between ages 12 and 13, probably because of the reluctance of the juvenile justice system to deal with very young offenders. The individual offending frequency increased with age in self‐reports, but it stayed constant in court referrals, probably because of limitations on the annual number of referrals per offender. There was significant continuity in offending in both court referrals and self‐reports, but continuity was greater in court referrals. The concentration of offending (and the importance of chronic offenders) was greater in self‐reports. An early age of onset predicted a large number of offenses in both self‐reports and court referrals. However, an early onset predicted a high rate of offending in court referrals but not in self‐reports, possibly because very young offenders who were referred to court were an extreme group. About 37% of offenders and 3% of offenses led to a court referral. The more frequent offenders were less likely to be referred to court after each offense, but most of them were referred to court sooner or later. There was a sharp increase between ages 12 and 13 in the probability of an offender and an offense leading to a court referral. It is concluded that criminal career research based on self‐reports sometimes yields different conclusions compared with research based on official records.     

Female Delinquents: the Effect of Offense Characteristics on Adult Criminal Careers in the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort

This paper uses the official juvenile offenses among delinquent girls in the 1958 Philadelphia Birth Cohort to investigate the two overarching questions. This research investigates the nature of delinquency conduct, offense-by-offense, and its relationship to adult crime status. Although it is convenient to think of an offender’s delinquency career as a whole, such a career actually consists of one or more specific offenses, and offense conduct can be worth studying in its own right. Thus, it is necessary to determine whether the timing, type, severity, court disposition, and so on, of these juvenile offenses can be used to predict adult career pathways. An extensive review of the literature revealed that investigations of early offense conduct and its connection to adult crime are exceedingly scarce. This study indicates as follows. First, the way a delinquent begins her criminal career is predictive of the adult trajectory that will be followed. Second, we also found that aspects of the first few offenses doe influence whether delinquent girls do continue committing crimes as adult. The strongest predictor of adult crime status was juvenile court dispositions.     

EXPLAINING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EMPLOYMENT AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY*

Most criminological theories predict an inverse relationship between employment and crime, but teenagers' involvement in paid work during the school year is correlated positively with delinquency and substance use. Whether the work–delinquency association is causal or spurious has been debated for a long time. This study estimates the effect of paid work on juvenile delinquency using longitudinal data from the national Monitoring the Future project. We address issues of spuriousness by using a two-level hierarchical model to estimate the relationships of within-individual changes in juvenile delinquency and substance use to those in paid work and other explanatory variables. We also disentangle the effects of actual employment from the preferences for employment to provide insight about the likely role of time-varying selection factors tied to employment, delinquency, school engagement, and leisure activities. Whereas causal effects of employment would produce differences based on whether and how many hours respondents worked, we found significantly higher rates of crime and substance use among nonemployed youth who preferred intensive versus moderate work. Our findings suggest the relationship between high-intensity work and delinquency results from preexisting factors that lead youth to desire varying levels of employment.     

A Criminal Career Study of the Continuity and Discontinuity of Sex Offending during the Adolescence-Adulthood Transition: A Prospective Longitudinal Study of Incarcerated Youth

Longitudinal research has seriously challenged assumptions that juvenile sex offenders (JSO) are characterized by high level of dangerousness, mental health problems, and crime specialization in sex offenses. The current study examines the longitudinal pattern of offending among a sample of JSO and a sample of juvenile nonsex offenders. The research design includes longitudinal data over a nine-year period allowing the examination of offending patterns and the crime mix from age 12 to age 23. The findings highlight that, while JSO are prone to persist offending in adulthood, there is limited continuity of sex offending. Further, the findings stress the importance of taking into account nonsexual juvenile delinquency, more specifically, youth violence, to make a better assessment of early adult offending outcomes of JSO.     

Part-time Jobs,Delinquency and Victimization Among Finnish Adolescents

Among lay people as well as among scholars it is sometimes assumed that adolescent work deters juvenile delinquency. In contrast, existing research suggests that there is a positive association between adolescent parttime work and delinquency. This study assesses this claim and examines in a nationally representative sample of 15-16-yearold Finnish adolescents ( n = 4347), the association between work during the school year and self-reported delinquency and victimization, and explore whether the possible associations are general or based on some subcategory of delinquent behaThere viour/victimization. The results of multivariate analyses indicate that intensive weekly working is significantly positively associated with delinquent behaviour. When gender, disposable allowances and various factors suggested by control, strain and differential association theories were controlled for, intensive work (10 hours or more remained a significant predictor of the following types of delinquency: beating up someone, driving without licence, buying stolen goods, vandalism at school and drunken driving. Intensive workers' likelihood of committing these acts were about two to per week) three times as high as nonworkers' likelihood of committing such acts. Intensive work was related to victimization only in bivariate models, suggesting that the work-victimization association does not reflect direct causation. In conclusion, intensive work appears to increase delinquent activity slightly. Although we do not argue that work is a major cause of delinquency in adolescence, we suggest caution against encouraging intensive work during the school year.     

CONTROLLING OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN: RACIALIZED VIEWS OF DELINQUENCY AND WHITES’ PUNITIVE ATTITUDES TOWARD JUVENILE OFFENDERS*

The juvenile justice system was founded on, and until recently developed around, the idea that society should afford delinquents more leniency and rehabilitative care than adult criminals because of their lower levels of physical and cognitive development and, thus, diminished culpability for law violations and higher amenability to treatment. The past four decades, however, have witnessed a sustained movement to recriminalize delinquency through the enactment of policies that treat juvenile offenders more like their adult counterparts. Feld (1999a) and others have argued that this punitive turn in juvenile justice is in part a result of the racialization of delinquency and violent victimization in the post–Civil Rights era. This study provides the first test of the key assumption underlying this thesis, namely, that Whites’ support for getting tough with juvenile offenders is in part tied to racialized views of youth crime. Drawing on data from a recent national survey, we examine the extent to which relative racial typifications about delinquency and victimization, as well as racial resentment, are associated with general punitiveness toward juvenile offenders as well as support for lower minimum ages of criminal justice jurisdiction. Regression results show that Whites who hold such typifications and those who are more racially resentful are both more likely to embrace punitive youth justice policies and favor transfers for younger offenders. The implications of the findings are discussed.     

Resiliency against victimization: Results from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health

Investigating the causes of why individuals desist from, or are resilient to, delinquency, crime, and other problem behaviors has captured the interests of scholars. Within the context of criminology, much of this research focused on resiliency against offending; that is, understanding how and why some individuals within high-risk environments do not engage in serious criminal offenses. The extant scholarship, however, has not fully explored the effects protective factors might have on fostering resiliency against victimization. Using a sample of respondents drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study investigated how individual protective factors and the accumulation of protective factors contribute to the explanation of resiliency against victimization. Analysis of the data revealed that commitment to school was the only statistically significant independent predictor of resiliency for at risk-individuals. Additional analyses indicated that a protective factor index measuring the accumulation of protection was significant across multiple measures of resiliency. The policy and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

A comparison of curfew and noncurfew violators using a self-report delinquency survey

The present study examines one city’s experience with a juvenile curfew ordinance. It compares characteristics of youths detained by the police for curfew violation with teenagers who did not have such police contact. Selfreport data reveal curfew violators admit committing more minor and serious delinquency, as well as status offenses, than noncurfew violators. Curfew violators also disclose higher victimization levels. Implications deriving from these observations are discussed.     

Examining the relationship between school suspensions/expulsions and felonies

This paper examines the suspensions and expulsions of students. Using individual student pupil (rather than incident) data, this research examines whether these rates are driven by a few high-volume offenders and whether high-volume offenders become felons. This study uses the number of students at three levels of violations: 0 offenses, 1–3 offenses, and four or more offenses. The authors also examined the relationship between the three groups of violators and committing a felony as a juvenile. The number of offenses per student ranged from 0 to 31. Findings indicated that those with 0 school infractions had no felonies, while the other two groups of violators 1–3 and four or more had a similar numbers of felonies. Implications for developmental models of delinquency are discussed.     

LOW SELF-CONTROL AND OPPORTUNITY: TESTING THE GENERAL THEORY OF CRIME AS AN EXPLANATION FOR GENDER DIFFERENCES IN DELINQUENCY*

This research tests Gottfredson and Hirschi's general theory of crime as an explanation for gender differences in the delinquency of approximately 2,000 Canadian secondary school students. Separate psychological factors, including a preference for risk seeking, impulsivity, temper, present oriented, and carelessness, are used as measures of self-control, and additional measures of the construct are taken from the frequency of self-reported smoking and drinking. Elements of delinquent opportunity are controlled for by including measures of parental/adult super-vision. These measures and their interactions are used to predict self-reported general delinquency, property offenses, violence, and drug offenses. Results provide partial support for the general theory, revealing relationships between measures of self-control and delinquency that vary by magnitude across genders and for different offense types. Implications for the generality of the theory are discussed.     

THE TIMING OF DELINQUENT BEHAVIOR AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR AFTER-SCHOOL PROGRAMS*

Research Summary: This study examines self-reports from two samples to assess the timing of delinquency. Results imply that the after-school hours are a time of elevated delinquency, but that the peak is modest compared with that observed in official records. Additionally, children who are unsupervised during the after-school hours - the primary target population for after-school programs - are found to be more delinquent at all times, not only after-school. Policy Implications: This finding suggests that factors (including social competencies and social bonding) in addition to inadequate supervision produce delinquency during the after-school hours and that the effectiveness of after-school programs for reducing delinquency will depend upon their ability to address these other factors through appropriate and high quality services.     

VIOLENT DELINQUENTS AND URBAN YOUTHS*

Violent juvenile crime is disproportionately concentrated in urban neighborhoods, and accordingly an understanding of the sources of serious delinquency is con founded by components of urbanism. These milieus usually have high rates of absolute poverty and relative economic deprivation, as well as weak social institutions. The persistent findings of delinquent peer contributions to delinquency have yet to be tested under conditions where social class and milieu effects are controlled. There is little empirical evidence to determine how adolescents in high-crime neighborhoods avoid delinquency despite frequent contact with delinquent peers. The differences between violent delinquents and other youths from comparable neighborhoods are little understood. This study contrasts a sample of chronically violent male juvenile offenders with the general male adolescent population (students and school dropouts) from inner-city neighborhoods in four cities. Violent delinquents differ from other male adolescents in inner cities in their attachments to school, their perceptions of school safety, their associations with officially delinquent peers, their perceptions of weak maternal authority, and the extent to which they have been victims of crime. Peer delinquency and drug“problems” predict the prevalence of three delinquency offense types for both violent offenders and neighborhood youths. Among violent delinquents, there appear to be different explanatory patterns, with one type better described by internal controls (locus of control), a developmental measure. Overall, there is strong support for integrated theory including control and learning components, and similar associations exist among inner-city youths as in the general adolescent male population. Despite the generally elevated rates of delinquency in inner cities, the explanations of serious and violent delinquency appear the same when subjects are sampled at the extremes of the distribution of behavior.     

Self-Reported Delinquency in India: A Study of High School and Approved School Boys in Tamil Nadu

Findings from a self-reported delinquency survey among high school (N = 517) and institutionalized (N = 306) boys in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu are reported as part of a larger study designed to tap several aspects of delinquency phenomena in a developing society. The present research suggests that self-reported delinquency in India resembles that of juveniles in economically developed nations in several respects but differs from it in other ways. Specifically, as found elsewhere, self-reported delinquency in Tamil Nadu largely consists of minor property offenses or status-technical violations. Also, institutionalized boys (official delinquents) more frequently report delinquency involvement compared to high school boys. However, while a general inverse relationship was found between the SES rank of boys in various high schools and institutions and their reported delinquency involvement, it appears that this is not necessarily a direct linear relationship. In contrast to the findings of self-report research in developed nations, both the volume and frequency of self-admitted involvement in delinquency is comparatively low for Tamil Nadu boys, reflecting the comparatively low offense and arrest rates for juveniles reported in official crime data in India. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

CHILD MALTREATMENT AND YOUTHFUL PROBLEM BEHAVIOR*

This paper adds to an accumulating body of research on the risk of delinquency among maltreated children. We use a prospective research design to address the following questions: (1) To what extent are maltreated children at risk of delinquency? (2) Is their rate of delinquency greater than that of two court-aged, nonmaltreated comparison samples: impoverished children and school children in general? (3) What is the effect of maltreatment net of age, race, gender, and family structure? (4) Is type of maltreatment associated with specific types of juvenile offenses? Maltreated children have higher rates of delinquency complaints than nonmaltreated school and impoverished children, but the effects diminish considerably when the demographic and family structure variables are controlled. In the maltreatment-school comparison, an overall maltreatment effect remains for complaints in general and status offenses, but not for property or violent offenses. Maltreated children are significantly different from nonmaltreated poor children for status offenses only. Specific forms of maltreatment are not especially predictive of any offense type. Generally, we conclude that the maltreatment-delinquency relationship has been exaggerated in previous research.     

Juvenile Delinquency in the Federal Republic of Germany

Juvenile delinquency has gained recognition worldwide as one of the most prominent criminological problem areas as well as a pressing crime political issue. The current state of this field in Germany is characterized by a tremendous increase after World War II, similar to other west European countries, but slightly leveling down since the Eighties. However, the great bulk of juvenile delinquency is built by minor offenses-in particular petty theft and non-serious road traffic offenses. Violence (although with an enormous increase), illegal drug offenses, and sexual crimes make together not more than one fifth of the total volume of youth crime. On the whole, juvenile delinquency represents the deviant behavior of young males; the proportion of female crime—although increasing too- is not higher than three decades ago, and consists mainly of shoplifting and bicycle theft. Youngsters of foreign groups or minorities are more involved in delinquency at present than in the Seventies or earlier, partly in activities of violent groups. While, in the past, rockers mainly got attention, now soccer hooligans and violent right-wing skinheads, especially when attacking minority people and asylum seekers, are in the forefront of public interest. This is true for East and West Germany. In general, the delinquents come mostly from the lower social strata, show socialization defects, have reduced start chances, are often unemployed, and are without or have less social support by their families. With regard to this, criminological experts favor socialization theories, social learning and control theories to explain these phenomena, emphasizing the binding forces of the underlying orientation of moral values. The corresponding guidelines of juvenile crime policy give preference to the application of non-custodial measures and diversion strategies on one hand, and to the reduction of freedom-depriving sanctions like community service or offender-victim-mediation on the other, indicating a successive retreat from a traditional punitive concept.     

Student Weapon Possession and the “Fear and Victimization Hypothesis”: Unraveling the Temporal Order

Using longitudinal data from nearly 4,000 students across 113 public schools in Kentucky, we attempt to unravel the direction of the relationships between student weapon carrying and various objective and subjective school‐crime experiences, including victimization, perceived risk of school victimization, and fear of school victimization. Overall, we found little support for the idea that fear and victimization increase weapon carrying, controlling for other theoretically important predictors, including delinquent offending. While 7th‐grade victimization was modestly associated with increased non‐gun weapon carrying in 8th grade, high perceptions of individual victimization risk in 7th grade decreased both subsequent gun and non‐gun weapon carrying. Fear of criminal victimization in 7th grade did not predict either type of subsequent (8th‐grade) weapon carrying. Though fear, risk, and victimization were inconsistent predictors of gun and non‐gun weapon carrying, we found strong and consistent support for the effects of weapon carrying on subsequent fear, risk, victimization, and offending. However, contrary to the implications of fear and victimization hypotheses, both gun carrying and non‐gun weapon carrying in the 8th grade increased fear of school crime, perceived risk, and actual victimization in the 9th grade. Implications of these findings for the applicability of a “weapons” or “triggering” effect are discussed.     

Risk assessment vs real prediction: The prediction problem and public trust

Confusing risk assessment and the prediction of individual behavior has led to false claims which, if translated into juvenile court or adult sentencing policies (selective incapacitation, for example), may lead to further erosion in public confidence in the justice system. Considerable emphasis has been placed on the consequences of false positives in the literature and in this paper. The false negative has different but equally damaging effects because the impression may be given that increasing the severity of sanctions for selected serious offenders is the solution to juvenile delinquency and adult crime. Analysis of official police records for three birth cohorts from Racine, Wisconsin, reveals that, although high-risk groups produce a disproportionate share of the delinquent and criminal behavior recorded in police reports and juveniles in high-risk groups continue into adult crime disproportionately to others, serious juvenile offenders still account for only a portion of the serious offenses that will ultimately be committed by adults. Therefore, selective incapacitation of early offenders may take only a small bite out of crime. When referrals rather than police contacts were utilized as the predictor variable, there was little difference in predictive efficiency.