Adolescent development and juvenile justice.

Assessing Juvenile Psychopathy: Developmental and Legal Implications

Psychopath. The word alone evokes powerful emotions and images. Attaching that label to a juvenile offender is a serious charge, and should be done so with caution, especially given that the standard assessment tools for psychopathy were originally developed for adults, not juveniles. As the MacArthur Research Network on Adolescent Development and Juvenile Justice has shown, and as the U.S. juv...

WORKING PAPER FOR THE MacARTHUR RESEARCH NETWORK ON ADOLESCENT DEVELOPMENT AND JUVENILE JUSTICE METHOD, MEASURES, AND PROCEDURES FOR THE JUVENILE ADJUDICATIVE COMPETENCE STUDY

Theory and Research on Desistance from Antisocial Activity among Serious Adolescent Offenders.

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 successfu...

Improving professional judgments of risk and amenability in juvenile justice.

The dual requirement to ensure community safety and promote a youthful offender's positive development permeates policy and frames daily practice in juvenile justice. Balancing those two demands, explain Edward Mulvey and Anne-Marie Iselin, requires justice system professionals at all levels to make extremely difficult decisions about the likely risk and amenability to treatment of adolescent o...

Multidimensional family therapy HIV/STD risk-reduction intervention: an integrative family-based model for drug-involved juvenile offenders.

Drug and juvenile justice involved youths show remarkably high rates of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/sexually transmitted disease (STD) risk behaviors. However, existing interventions aimed at reducing adolescent HIV risk behavior have rarely targeted these vulnerable young adolescents, and many approaches focus on individual-level change without attention to family or contextual influenc...