Although police misconduct has interested policing scholars for many years, extant research has been largely atheoretical and has ignored the role of organizational justice in understanding the behavior. This study uses survey data from a random sample of 483 police officers employed in the Philadelphia Police Department to explore the role of organizational justice in police misconduct. Results indicate that officers who view their agency as fair and just in managerial practices are less likely to adhere to the code of silence or believe that police corruption in pursuit of a noble cause is justified. Furthermore, perceptions of organizational justice are associated with lower levels of engagement in several forms of police misconduct. The results suggest that organizational justice is a promising framework to understand police misconduct and may help guide police administrators in the implementation of effective management strategies to reduce the incidence of the behavior.

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Age is one of the most robust correlates of criminal behavior. Yet, explanations for this relationship are varied and conflicting. Developmental theories point to a multitude of sociological, psychological, and biological changes that occur during adolescence and adulthood. One prominent criminological perspective outlined by Gottfredson and Hirschi claims that age has a direct effect on crime, inexplicable from sociological and psychological variables. Despite the attention this claim has received, few direct empirical tests of it have been conducted. We use data from Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of over 1,300 serious youthful offenders (85.8% male, 40.1% African-American, 34.3% Hispanic, 21.0% White), to test this claim. On average, youths were 16.5 years old at the initial interview and were followed for 7 years. We use multilevel longitudinal models to assess the extent to which the direct effects of age are reduced to statistical and substantive non-significance when constructs from a wide range of developmental and criminological theories are controlled. Unlike previous studies, we are able to control for changes across numerous realms emphasized within differing theoretical perspectives including social control (e.g., employment and marriage), procedural justice (e.g., perceptions of the legitimacy and fairness of the legal system), learning (e.g., gang membership and exposure to antisocial peers), strain (e.g., victimization and relationship breakup), psychosocial maturity (e.g., impulse control, self-regulation and moral disengagement), and rational choice (e.g., costs and rewards of crime). Assessed separately, these perspectives explain anywhere from 3% (procedural justice) to 49% (social learning) of the age-crime relationship. Together, changes in these constructs explain 69% of the drop in crime from ages 15 to 25. We conclude that the relationship between age and crime in adolescence and early adulthood is largely explainable, though not entirely, attributable to multiple co-occurring developmental changes.

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Because many serious adolescent offenders reduce their antisocial behavior after court involvement, understanding the patterns and mechanisms of the process of desistance from criminal activity is essential for developing effective interventions and legal policy. This study examined patterns of self-reported antisocial behavior over a 3-year period after court involvement in a sample of 1,119 serious male adolescent offenders. Using growth mixture models, and incorporating time at risk for offending in the community, we identified five trajectory groups, including a "persister" group (8.7% of the sample) and a "desister" group (14.6% of the sample). Case characteristics (age, ethnicity, antisocial history, deviant peers, a criminal father, substance use, psychosocial maturity) differentiated the five trajectory groups well, but did not effectively differentiate the persisting from desisting group. We show that even the most serious adolescent offenders report relatively low levels of antisocial activity after court involvement, but that distinguishing effectively between high-frequency offenders who desist and those who persist requires further consideration of potentially important dynamic factors related to this process.There is broad recognition of the potential of longitudinal data to inform the study of juvenile crime and delinquency. Over the last few decades, researchers concerned with the development of antisocial behavior have produced many large prospective studies worldwide (see Thornberry & Krohn, 2003) and numerous secondary analysis projects (e.g., Broidy et al., 2003;Sampson & Laub, 1993). The introduction and refinement of new methodological and statistical techniques, particularly trajectory modeling (Muthén & Muthén, 2000;Nagin, 1999Nagin, , 2005Piquero, 2008), have fueled these efforts, allowing researchers to directly examine group-based patterns of antisocial behavior over time. These efforts have clarified our understanding of the course of particular behavioral patterns over different periods of development (e.g., the stability of aggressive behavior; Coie & Dodge, Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Edward P. Mulvey, Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, 3811 O'Hara Street, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; mulveyep@upmc.edu. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptDev Psychopathol. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 July 23. 1998;Piquero, Farrington, & Blumstein, 2003), and the importance of particular events at different ages for promoting onset or maintenance of antisocial activity (e.g., Kokko, Tremblay, Lacourse, Nagin, & Vitaro, 2006;Patterson & Stouthamer-Loeber, 1984).Panel studies have considerable potential for helping juvenile justice and child welfare professionals formulate more informed identification of at-risk groups and more focused preventive interventions (Mulvey & Woolard, 1997). Existing longitudinal research is minimally useful, however, in providing a clear picture of the offending patterns of adolescents wh...