Improving juvenile court decision making requires information about how serious adolescent offenders desist from antisocial activity. A systematic research agenda on this topic requires consideration of several processes, including normative development in late adolescence, what constitutes desistance, and the factors likely to promote the end of involvement in antisocial behavior and successful adjustment in early adulthood. This article presents an overview of the major points to consider in pursuing this research agenda. Keywordsdesistance from crime; juvenile delinquency careers; stopping antisocial behaviorWe have always expected a great deal from the juvenile justice system. On one hand, the system is charged with keeping communities safe, using theories and approaches-such as deterrence or incapacitation-that are common to the criminal justice system. In recent years, juvenile courts have the added responsibility to ensure that its responses are proportional, making sure NIH Public Access

Implementing a large, longitudinal study of any sample is a major undertaking. The challenges are compounded when the study involves multiple sites and a high-risk sample. This article outlines the methodology for the Pathways to Desistance study, a multisite, longitudinal study of serious juvenile offenders, and discusses the key operational decisions with the greatest impact on the study design.Keywords juvenile delinquents; juvenile offenders; multisite study; participant retention; operational issues; participant recruitment; longitudinal studies; data collection; tracking participants; Pathways to Desistance; methods Over the past 2 decades, a great deal has been learned about the risk indicators associated with adolescent antisocial behavior and delinquency. Indeed, much has been clarified about how delinquent behavior starts, the general trajectory of this behavior during adolescence, and the relative predictive power of certain risk indicators (see, for example, Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986;Cicchetti & Cohen, 1995;Farrington, 1997;LeBlanc & Loeber, 1998;Loeber, Farrington, Stouthamer-Loeber, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2001;Moffitt, 1993;Sampson & Laub, 1990, 1997. One particularly important finding to emerge from this literature is that relatively few adolescent offenders go on to serious adult offending (Loeber & Farrington, 2000;Moffitt, 1993). Consequently, one of the most pressing current challenges for the field is to reliably NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptYouth Violence Juv Justice. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 29. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript distinguish between juvenile offenders who will continue problem behavior beyond adolescence and those who will not.Successfully meeting this challenge requires a greater empirical understanding about how and why juveniles desist from committing crime. Several calls have been made for researchers to study desistance from criminal activity with the same vigor exerted toward issues surrounding the onset of criminal activity (e.g., Farrington, 1997), yet the literature in this domain remains scant. One comprehensive approach to understanding this process would be to examine desistance from criminal activity prospectively, using multiple sources of information beyond official reporting (Farrington, 1997). This approach would be guided by the literature on child and adolescent development, and sensitive to the potential implications of findings for designing interventions and developing rational justice policies.The Pathways to Desistance Project highlighted in this special edition is an attempt to take up this challenge. It is a large-scale, two-site longitudinal examination of desistance from crime among adolescent serious offenders. The goal of the current study was to elucidate how developmental processes, social context, and intervention and sanctioning experiences affect the process of desistance from crime. The current study employed a prospective design with a broad measurement...

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 doseresponse 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. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptCriminology. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 4. Recent policies have narrowed the jurisdiction of juvenile court by removing the most serious offenders through various mechanisms, which include waiver, statutory exclusion, and lowering the age of majority (Fagan, 2008;Feld, 1998Feld, , 1999Griffin, 2003;Zimring, 1998). These changes have been occurring in an ongoing cycle for nearly three decades, capped by a frenzy in the 1990s, when virtually every state acted in some way to "toughen up" laws governing the processing of serious juvenile offenders. The removal of many serious offenders from juvenile court jurisdiction has raised basic questions about the viability of the juvenile court itself (Fagan, Kupchik, and Liberman, 2007). Given this political environment, demonstrating the effectiveness of the juvenile courts' treatment and confinement practices is essential for informed debate about future juvenile justice policy.It is important to understand what prompted all this change in the first place. In reaction to increases in rates of youth violence in the 1980s (Blumstein and Wallman, 2000), both policy makers and the public lost confidence in the capacity of the juvenile court to fulfill its mission of effectively treating and/or deterring serious juvenile offenders from committing future crimes (Moon, Cullen, and Wright, 2003). Zimring (1998) suggests that the perception of leniency led to a related perception of increased public safety risks. Perceived short stays in juvenile facilities also offended the popular and...

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Objectives: Researchers have used both self-reports and official records to measure the prevalence and frequency of crime and delinquency. Few studies have compared longitudinally the validity of these two measures across gender and race/ethnicity in order to assess concordance. Methods: Using data from the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of 1,354 serious youthful offenders, we compare official records of arrest and self-reports of arrest over seven years. Results: Findings show moderate agreement between self-reports and official arrests, which is fairly stable over time and quite similar across both gender and race/ethnicity. We do not find any race differences in the prevalence of official arrests, but do observe a gender difference in official arrests that is not accounted for by self-reported arrests. Conclusions: Further work on issues on the validity and reliability of different forms of offending data across demographic groups is needed.

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...

Prior research indicates that adolescent offenders transferred to adult court are more likely to recidivate than those retained in the juvenile system. The studies supporting this conclusion, however, are limited in addressing the issue of heterogeneity among transferred adolescents. This study estimates the effect of transfer on later crime using a sample of 654 serious juvenile offenders, 29% of whom were transferred. We use propensity score matching to reduce potential selection bias, and we partition the sample on legal characteristics to examine subgroup effects. We find an overall null effect of transfer on re-arrest, but evidence of differential effects of transfer for adolescents with different offending histories. These results suggest that evaluating the effects of transfer for all transferred adolescents together may lead to misguided policy conclusions.

Because different methods for studying criminal behavior all suffer from important limitations, it is useful to apply different methodologies to the same population whenever possible. In this analysis, we examine the relationships between self-report and official record-based measures of offending activity using populations of adolescent serious offenders in Phoenix, Arizona, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.