Violent offending among juveniles: A 7-year longitudinal study of recidivism, desistance, and associations with mental health.

Abstract

Serious and violent offending among juveniles is a consistent concern of researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, yet the development of violent offending remains poorly understood because of limited availability of relevant data, small sample sizes, and shortage of longitudinal data sets. This study analyzed developmental patterns of violent offending over 7 years in the complete population of court-referred youth in Connecticut between 2006 and 2012 (N = 58,678; mean age at first offense = 14.7 years). This unique dataset provided several key findings: First, results from a latent class growth analysis showed that violent crimes peaked at age 14-15, with high-rate adolescent offenders (3.7% of the sample) accounting for 31.9% of all violent offenses. Further, 74.2% of this group desisted from violent crimes in adulthood. Higher levels of self-reported anger/irritability slightly increased the odds of violent recidivism (odds ratio, OR = 1.09), where higher levels of depression/anxiety depressed the odds (OR = 0.89). The overrepresentation of males, non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic youth among high-rate adolescence offenders were traceable through adolescence but not beyond the age of 18. Together, these finding may help to inform new delinquency interventions that target the needs of this proportionally small group of violent adolescent offenders accounting for a large amount of violent crimes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Improved Educational Achievement as a Path to Desistance

“…Subsequent to this work, with the help of funding from the U.S. Institute of Educational Sciences, we worked with the state of Connecticut to generate a set of administrative data, merging information from the CSSD and the Connecticut State Department of Education (Hein et al, 2017). These data contained the administrative records from seven academic years (2006–2007 to 2012–2013) for 58,678 JJ-involved youth.…”

Constellations of youth criminogenic factors associated with young adult violent criminal behavior

“…It is widely acknowledged, specifically in high-income countries, that a minority of young adult offenders are responsible for the large majority of violent crimes (Falk et al 2014;Farrington et al 2006;Laub 2004;Snyder and Sickmund 2006). A vast literature has been amassed on the identification of juvenile offenders at risk to become persistent violent offenders (Baglivio et al 2014;Hein et al 2017). Early onset of antisocial or criminal behavior (Moffitt 1993), specifically before the age of 12 (DeLisi and Piquero 2011; Loeber and Farrington 2011), involvement in delinquency and drug use (Lipsey and Derzon 1998), negative or antisocial attitude and the accumulation of criminogenic factors, particularly over multiple domains (Baglivio et al 2014), have been singled out as key determinants of persistence and escalation of criminal behavior into early adulthood.…”

Criminal Behavior and School Discipline in Juvenile Justice-Involved Youth with Autism

“…In order to group offense types, we used the taxonomy from the office for juvenile justice and delinquency prevention (OJJDP; Puzzanchera et al 2012), which we have used in a previous study (Hein et al 2017). No specific hierarchy of offenses was used in the present study meaning we did not analyze seriousness of offense or only the most serious offenses.…”