This study examines the news media coverage of the 1999 Columbine school shootings, as a component of a noted crime myth of the juvenile superpredator. Thematic content analysis was conducted on 683 articles selected from print and broadcast media, revealing four themes of coverage, including the identification and description of the victims, details of victims’ deaths, coverage of memorial ser...

Denise C. Gottfredson, Ph.D., is a professor at the University of Maryland Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology. Gottfredson’s research interests include delinquency and delinquency prevention, and particularly the effects of school environments on youth behavior. Brook W. Kearley is a researcher at Social Solutions, Inc. Her primary research interests include the evaluation of drug t...

Previous research suggests that mass incarceration in the United States may have contributed to lower rates of violent crime since the 1990s but, surprisingly, finds no evidence of an effect of imprisonment on violent crime prior to 1991. This raises what Steven Levitt has called “a real puzzle.” This study offers the solution to the puzzle: the error in all prior studies is that they focus exc...

OBJECTIVE This article first summarizes key research findings from the Pittsburgh Youth Study from 1987 to the present, and focuses on delinquency in 1,517 young men who have been followed up from late childhood into their 20s. Second, the article addresses how indicators of self-control prospectively predict later offending, and whether the prediction shows individual difference in the age-cri...

A psychological perspective on youth knife culture " Looking back I know that was wrong, but at that stage you end up in the mind frame you think-fuck this " Per-Olof Wikstrom for their comments and suggestions at various iterations of this report. 3 • Many young people carry knives not with the deliberate intention to harm, but to protect themselves or to gain respect from peers. It is importa...

The publicity about online "predators" who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate. Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles more often fit a model of statutory rape--adult offenders who meet, develop relationships with, and openly seduce underage teenagers--than a model of forcible sexual assault or pedophilic child molesting. This is a serious proble...

This paper investigates the relationship between local crime rates and the retirement decisions of older Americans. We do so by linking data from the Health and Retirement Study with measures of local crime patterns taken from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Unified Crime Reports. If we condition on crime rates alone, there is either a weakly positive or no relationship between local crim...

The millennium marks the beginning of a second century for the formal system of juvenile justice in the United States. From its inception, the central focus of the system has been delinquency, an amorphous construct that includes not only “criminal” behavior but also an array of youthful actions that offend prevailing social mores. Thus, the meaning of delinquency is markedly time dependent. Li...

15 years after Brazil adopted one of Latin America's most progressive juvenile justice laws, substantially reflecting the guarantees contained in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the country's juvenile detention centres continue to be grossly deficient. Many facilities are decaying, filthy, and dangerously overcrowded, failing to meet basic standards of health and hygiene (se...