DEINSTITUTIONALIZATION OF JUVENILE OFFENDERS*

This research investigated the effects of the closing of a juvenile correctional institution. A nonequivalent control group design was used to compare the effects of the closing on placements and criminal behavior for three groups (N = 927) whose institutionalization experiences differed. Official crime data were obtained for all, and interviews were attempted with 752 juveniles. The noninstitutionalized group's recidivism was significantly higher than that of the institutionalized groups both during and after the period of institutionalization. Consistent group differences in offending were observed for crimes against property but not for crimes involving drugs or crimes against persons. These differences were significant but not as pronounced when only the most serious crimes were considered. Implications for the design of effective juvenile correctional strategies are discussed.     

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.     

RESTITUTION AND RECIDIVISM RATES OF JUVENILE OFFENDERS: RESULTS FROM FOUR EXPERIMENTAL STUDIES*

One of the major changes in juvenile justice during the past decade has been the increased reliance on restitution as a sanction for juvenile offenders. Although a great deal has been learned during the past 10 years about the operation of restitution programs, much remains unknown regarding its impact on recidivism rates. This report contains the results from four random-assignment experiments conducted simultaneously in four communities: Boise, Idaho, Washington, D. C., Clayton County, Georgia, and Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. In all four studies, youths were randomly assigned into restitution and into traditional dispositions. On the whole, the results show that restitution may have a small but important effect on recidivism. However, not all programs will be able to achieve this effect, either because of program management and strategy, community circumstances, or other factors. Youths in the restitution groups never had higher recidivism rates than those in probation or detention conditions. In two of the four studies, the juveniles in restitution clearly had fewer subsequent recontacts with the court during the two-to-three-year follow-up.     

RELIGION,DISCRIMINATORY ATTITUDES AND THE ORIENTATIONS OF JUVENILE JUSTICE PERSONNEL: A RESEARCH NOTE*

Advancements in the understanding of racial and gender disparity in case outcomes are evident in the theoretical and empirical refinements that emphasize the contingencies of decision making. In this article, we argue that a conservative world view reflects a patterning of attitudes that includes interrelationships among beliefs in a literal interpretation of the Bible and racial and gender stereotyping. Our hypothesis is that this conservative resonance will predict more punitive correctional orientations among a sample of juvenile justice personnel. The findings provide support for the existence of a conservative patterning of attitudes that predict punitive orientations. The resonance is less effective in explaining rehabilitative philosophies. The results have implications for assessing the issue of racial and gender bias in the juvenile justice system.     

CONTINGENCY CONTRACTING WITH JUVENILE OFFENDERS

This study was designed to test whether or not juvenile subjects who were on probation and were under a court order to pay fines would show an increased rate of work when positive contingencies of reinforcement were used in the form of contingency contracts.     

TESTING A BAYESIAN LEARNING THEORY OF DETERRENCE AMONG SERIOUS JUVENILE OFFENDERS*

The effect of criminal experience on risk perceptions is of central importance to deterrence theory but has been vastly understudied. This article develops a realistic Bayesian learning model of how individuals will update their risk perceptions over time in response to the signals they receive during their offending experiences. This model implies a simple function that we estimate to determine the deterrent effect of an arrest. We find that an individual who commits one crime and is arrested will increase his or her perceived probability of being caught by 6.3 percent compared with if he or she had not been arrested. We also find evidence that the more informative the signal received by an individual is, the more he or she will respond to it, which is consistent with more experienced offenders responding less to an arrest than less experienced offenders do. Parsing our results out by type of crime indicates that an individual who is arrested for an aggressive crime will increase both his or her aggressive crime risk perception as well as his or her income‐generating crime risk perception, although the magnitude of the former may be slightly larger. This implies that risk perception updating, and thus potentially deterrence, may be partially, although not completely, crime specific.     

RACE,RACIAL THREAT,AND SENTENCING OF HABITUAL OFFENDERS*

As legislatures proliferate novel “enhancements” to criminal sentencing, such as “three-strikes” and related provisions, and as criminologists debate their effects, the role of existing enhancements, such as habitual offender statutes, has received little empirical attention. This article explores the effect of race in the decision to prosecute and sentence eligible defendants as “habitual” offenders. During FY 1992–93, 9,690 males admitted to prison in Florida were statutorily eligible (two prior felony convictions or one prior violent felony conviction) for sentencing as “habitual” offenders. Approximately 20% received that disposition. They will serve at least 75% of their enhanced sentence as compared with the state average of about 40%. Logistic regression, controlling for prior record, crime seriousness, and other relevant factors, shows a significant and substantial race effect. The disadvantage of black defendants is particularly strong for drug offenses and for property crimes that have relatively high victimization rates for whites (larceny, burglary). Race is less consequential for violent and weapons-related crimes. Race effects are more often significant in sentencing contexts that are low in terms of percent black, racial income inequality, drug arrest rates, and violent crime rates. The relevance of these findings for a “racial threat” interpretation of sentencing outcomes is discussed.     

ESTIMATING A DOSE‐RESPONSE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LENGTH OF STAY AND FUTURE RECIDIVISM IN SERIOUS JUVENILE OFFENDERS*

The effect of sanctions on subsequent criminal activity is of central theoretical importance in criminology. A key question for juvenile justice policy is the degree to which serious juvenile offenders respond to sanctions and/or treatment administered by the juvenile court. The policy question germane to this debate is finding the level of confinement within the juvenile justice system that maximizes the public safety and therapeutic benefits of institutional confinement. Unfortunately, research on this issue has been limited with regard to serious juvenile offenders. We use longitudinal data from a large sample of serious juvenile offenders from two large cities to 1) estimate a causal treatment effect of institutional placement, as opposed to probation, on future rate of rearrest and 2) investigate the existence of a marginal effect (i.e., benefit) for longer length of stay once the institutional placement decision had been made. We accomplish the latter by determining a dose‐response relationship between the length of stay and future rates of rearrest and self‐reported offending. The results suggest that an overall null effect of placement exists on future rates of rearrest or self‐reported offending for serious juvenile offenders. We also find that, for the group placed out of the community, it is apparent that little or no marginal benefit exists for longer lengths of stay. Theoretical, empirical, and policy issues are outlined.     

FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS,JUVENILE DELINQUENCY,AND ADULT CRIMINALITY*

Home observations during childhood and criminal records 30 years later are used to address questions of relative impact among features of child rearing influencing male criminal outcomes. The results suggest two mechanisms: Maternal behavior appears to influence juvenile delinquency and, through those effects, adult criminality. Paternal interaction with the family, however, appears to have a more direct influence on the probability of adult criminal behavior.     

CRIMINAL PROPENSITIES,DISCRETE GROUPS OF OFFENDERS,AND PERSISTENCE IN CRIME*

Criminal propensity theorists argue that the causes of variation in offending behavior can be traced to variation in one or more causal traits. Other theorists contend that there is actually more than one type of offender and that more than one causal mechanism operates to explain offending behavior. In this article, some of the implications of these two positions are considered. Then, their congruence with recidivism data from a cohort of post-age-16 North Carolina institutional releasees (N = 848) is assessed, The analysis focuses specifically on whether the correlates of offending persistence are similar across two categories of individuals: those who experienced their first adjudication at an early age and those who were first adjudicated at a later age. In support of both positions, some similarities and some differences in the correlates of persistence were discovered. The differences, however, were only evident when the threshold for late first adjudication was set to age 12. When this threshold was raised to higher ages, the differences disappeared.     

RELIGION AND CRIME REEXAMINED: THE IMPACT OF RELIGION,SECULAR CONTROLS,AND SOCIAL ECOLOGY ON ADULT CRIMINALITY*

Since Hirschi and Stark's (1969) surprising failure to find religious (“hellfire”) effects on delinquency, subsequent research has generally revealed an inverse relationship between religiosity and various forms of deviance, delinquency, and crime. The complexity of the relationship and conditions under which it holds, however, continue to be debated. Although a few researchers have found that religion's influence is noncontingent, most have found support—especially among youths—for effects that vary by denomination, type of offense, and social and/or religious context. More recently the relationship has been reported as spurious when relevant secular controls are included. Our research attempts to resolve these issues by testing the religion-crime relationship in models with a comprehensive crime measure and three separate dimensions of religiosity. We also control for secular constraints, religious networks, and social ecology. We found that, among our religiosity measures, participation in religious activities was a persistent and noncontingent inhibiter of adult crime.     

TURNING OFFENDERS INTO RESPONSIBLE PARENTS AND CHILD SUPPORT PAYERS*

This article describes four demonstration projects that strive to promote responsible behavior with respect to parenting, child support payment, and employment among incarcerated and paroled parents with child support obligations. These projects, conducted in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Texas, with support from the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement and evaluated by the Center for Policy Research, led to a number of common outcomes and lessons. The projects revealed that inmates want help with child support, parenting, and employment and that prisons can be effective settings in which to conduct such interventions. Family reintegration programs were popular with inmates and may have helped to avoid the rupture of parent–child relationships commonly associated with incarceration. Although employment is the key to child support payment following release, rates of postrelease employment and earnings at all project sites were low and the employment programs were of limited utility in helping released offenders find jobs. Agencies dealing with child support, employment, and criminal justice need to adopt more effective policies with incarcerated parents including transitional job programs that guarantee immediate, subsidized employment upon release, child support guidelines that adjust for low earnings, and better training and education opportunities during incarceration.     

A REAPPRAISAL OF THE OVERLAP OF VIOLENT OFFENDERS AND VICTIMS*

Because research shows a close association between offending and victimization, recent work has argued that theories that account for crime should explain victimization as well. The current study uses a new approach to examine the extent of the overlap between offenders who commit violent crime and victims of violence to determine whether it is worthwhile to pursue separate theories to account for these phenomena. Specifically, we take the statistical approach that Osgood and Schreck (2007) developed for analyzing specialization in violent versus property offending and apply it to analyzing tendencies to gravitate toward violent offending versus victimization. In doing so, we treat the differentiation into victim and offender roles as an individual‐level latent variable while controlling for confounding between the likelihood that individuals will take either role in violent acts and their overall numbers of encounters with violence (as either offender or victim). Our purpose is to examine 1) whether significant differentiation can be observed between the tendency to be an offender versus the tendency to be a victim, 2) whether any such differential tendency is stable over time, and 3) if it is possible to predict whether individuals will tend toward violent offending versus victimization. Using two waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to explore these objectives, we find significant and stable levels of differentiation between offenders and victims. Moreover, this differentiation is predictable with explanatory variables.     

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.