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Research Summary: One recent aspect of discourse about sex offenders is a debate about whether juvenile sex offending should be targeted with adult–style registration and stigma. But data on sex offending are quite thin, and data on the link between juvenile sex offending and adult careers are almost nonexistent. In fact, public policies with regard to sex offenders and the nature of their sexual offending assume that they are persistent specialists whose sexual offending is both recidivistic and dangerous. Yet, research on these assumptions is mixed, which leads some researchers to conclude that just about anything can be stated with regard to sex offenders. In an effort to overcome the limitations of previous research (highly select samples, short follow–up periods, lack of comparison group), the current study employs data from three birth cohorts from Racine, Wisconsin to examine the issue of juvenile to adult sex offending and its implications for current sex offender public policy. Policy Implications: Several results emerged from the current study. First, the fraction of juvenile sex offenders who committed adult sex offenses was quite small. Second, males who committed juvenile sex offenses were a tiny fraction of the cohort males who had a police contact for a juvenile offense. Third, the best predictor during a juvenile career for adult sex offending was the frequency of offending as a juvenile rather than whether a boy committed a sexual offense. Whether a male in Racine had a juvenile sex police contact contributed little to predicting his likelihood of adult sex offending. Specifically, 8.5% of males with juvenile sex police contacts had adult sex police contacts compared with 6.2% of males with any non–sex juvenile contact. With regard to policy, our findings also indicate that concentrating effort on those who were juvenile sex offenders will miss more than 90% of the cohort members who commit sex crimes as adults and will misidentify 90% of the targeted group of the juveniles as adult sex offenders. Such errors speak to the near impossibility of predicting which adolescent sex offenders will emerge as adult sex offenders and cast some doubt on the long–term predictive utility of juvenile sex offender registration.

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One of the major arguments for the elimination of firearms, and derivatively for gun control laws, is that such measures would reduce the number of criminal homicides. 1 It has been argued, however, that eliminating guns would have no such effect because if somebody wants to kill, he will find a weapon to achieve "his destructive goal"; there is, it is said, more than one way to skin a cat. 2 This paper is an attempt to bring this phase of the gun control debate closer to a resolution, through analysis of data from the Police Department of the City of Chicago on reported criminal homicides and serious, but not fatal, criminal assaults during 1965, 1966, and 1967. HoMICIDE AND THE INTENTION To KILL If all homicides resulted from such a single-minded intention to kill as gangland killings, laws prohibiting firearms would not have a substan

This study uses data from the Second Philadelphia Birth Cohort to examine the natural history of sex offenders and their involvement in sexual offending through age 26. Several key findings emerged from our effort. First, only one in 10 of the 221 mate and female juvenile sex offenders had a sex-related offense during the first eight years of adulthood. Second, 92 percent of all the cohort mates with adult sex records had no prior juvenile sex offense. Third, a boy with no sex contacts but five or more total juvenile police contacts was more than twice as likely to commit a sex crime as an adult as a juvenile sex offender with fewer than five total police contacts. Fourth, multinomial logistic regression results demonstrated that being a juvenile sex offender did not significantly increase the likelihood for an individual being an adult sex offender, nor did the frequency of juvenile sex offending. In short, the assumptions underpinning current registration and notification taws are fraught with problems and should be reconsidered .

It is unlikely that hostile attitudes about criminals or beliefs that punishments for crime were too lenient were the major causes of the explosive increase in punishments in the United States after 1970. Public hostility toward criminals has been a consistent theme in this country for a long time, but it did not cause big increases in imprisonment before 1970 in the United States or large expansions of incarceration elsewhere. In this article, the authors argue that growth in the salience of crime as a citizen concern and increasing public distrust of government competence and legitimacy were two of a number of changes that transformed ever-present hostile attitudes into a dynamic force in American politics. Negative attitudes toward offenders are a necessary condition for anticrime crusades, but they are always present. It was the addition of fear and distrust into the law and politics of punishment setting that produced the perfect storm of punitive expansion.