Predicting successful outcomes for serious and chronic juveniles in residential placement

In the past decade, juvenile justice agencies have become more reliant on objective risk scales based on an actuarial approach to assessing risk. Risk assessment scales are used as decision-making guides at multiple points in the juvenile justice system. However, little research has focused on assessment of more serious offenders facing removal from the community. Enormous benefits can be derived, both in public safety and cost savings, from successful interventions with these offenders. Identifying offenders most amenable to intervention and at lowest risk for offending upon leaving placement represents a significant challenge. In this study, a placement risk screen was developed that assesses amenability to treatment in a residential treatment program and later risk for adult criminality. The relationship between suspected risk factors, success in a residential treatment program, and adult offending was assessed in a population of 81 male delinquent youths. Many factors are believed to have a bearing on success in treatment and later offending behavior, but only a small number of these were statistically significant. The results suggest that success in residential placement can reduce future offending, but that youth should first be screened for amenability to the program so scarce resources can be conserved. The proposed placement risk screen can assist juvenile court judges, officers, and residential treatment staff in identifying youth most suitable for treatment and who represent a lower risk to the community.     

Intergenerational offending in Liverpool and the north-west of England, 1850–1914

Using contemporary sources from the north-west of England in the Victorian period, the authors examine the putative connections made by contemporaries which linked together ‘bad’ parenting and the transmission of criminal traits. Poor parenting practices were a prevalent explanation for juvenile (leading onto sustained) delinquency, especially in the mid to late nineteenth century. Popular narratives by Charles Dickens and media opinion-formers were very influential in depicting neglectful mothers who did not socialise their children into law-abiding, useful members of society, and criminal fathers who inducted their children into their own criminal affairs and organisations. This article examines the reality of intergenerational offending (using prison- and court-generated data) to show that there is very little convincing research that proves direct intergenerational transmission of offending practices (i.e. parent-to-child-offending transmission). The authors then examine other possible routes of intergenerational offending using case studies and archival research, and the article concludes that environmental/socio-economic conditions and wider familial/neighbourhood relationships were, in fact, the main trigger for onset of offending, and the maintenance of criminal careers, rather than direct familial transmission. The article is therefore an important marker in understanding the processes which inhibit/generate criminality in a significant number of juvenile offenders in this period.