High-profile and tragic massmurder events committed by teens periodically push youth violence into the national spotlight. Although the high-profile events are uncommon, homicide is still a leading cause of death among youth ages 10 to 24 years in the United States, and 10% of all serious violent crimes do involve a juvenile offender.1,2 With regard to any homicide, and especially those committ...

Within the field of sociology, conduct problems are often described in terms of juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquency is a legal term with social implications. Often, delinquent behavior represents an effort of a youth to handle a difficult situation in his or her life, but with behavior which has been proscribed by legislative action. Most legal definitions of delinquency include at least...

Prior to the creation of the first juvenile court, most children who committed crimes in the colonial United States were prosecuted as adults in the tradition of English law. Common law of that period held that children under the age of 7 were presumed incapable of committing a crime (the defense of “infancy”). Children between the ages of 7 and 14 were presumed responsible for their acts, but ...

The school to work transition and the early career path can be di cult for disadvantaged youth. Their labor market is usually studied ignoring the presence of the criminal sector, and yet a large share of them participate in crime. To study these outcomes jointly and explore how they relate, I build and estimate a two-sector search model allowing for a rich set of interactions between the two s...

PRELIMINARY. PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION Mimicking the US in 1980 and 1990s, Brazil is a remarkable case of a major shift in homicides. After increasing steadily throughout the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, homicides reached a peak in 2003, and then fell steeply. First, I show a strong time-series co-movement between homicide rates and the percentage of the population in 15-24...

Elizabeth Scott and Laurence Steinberg explore the dramatic changes in the law's conception of young offenders between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. At the dawn of the juvenile court era, they note, most youths were tried and punished as if they were adults. Early juvenile court reformers argued strongly against such a view, believing that the justice ...

There has been a call to better link public health and criminal justice approaches to best address crime problems generally, and youth and gang violence in particular. Importantly, there has yet to be a systematic examination of how criminal justice approaches can be integrated within a public health framework. This paper examines the strengths and challenges with mapping gang research and evid...

We examine how social demographics (gender, age, or race-ethnicity), census tract characteristics, and family environment during childhood relate to variability in the lifecourse priorities of 344 Cherokee and white youth during emerging adulthood (age 19-24). Analyses were performed using recursive partitioning and random forest methods to examine determinants of prioritizing education, family...