Most criminologists acknowledge limited, but acceptable, uses for self-report survey techniques to measure common, non-serious offenses among youth. However, such techniques are likely to be challenged by critics for the study of serious violent crime. In fact, despite the availability of data on self-reports of violence in Monitoring the Future Surveys conducted for over a quarter of a century...

This paper investigates the effect of delinquency in youth on subsequent educational attainment. To do so, we focus on delinquent acts committed by age 16 and examine their impact on two measures of educational attainment: high school graduation and college graduation. Using information on males from the extremely rich National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we find plausible evidence that ...

The Youth Justice Service began in 1999 in Queensland. It embodied a new vision for the supervision, rehabilitation and reintegration of young offenders serving community-based orders. Evidence suggests that the Youth Justice Service failed to change significantly the pathways of young offenders. A random sample of 190 clients drawn from the Youth Justice Service and Area Offices that used trad...

Pathways to Desistance How and why do many serious adolescent offenders stop offending while others continue to commit crimes? This series of bulletins presents findings from the Pathways to Desistance study, a multidisciplinary investigation that attempts to answer this question. Investigators interviewed 1,354 young offenders from Philadelphia and Phoenix for 7 years after their convictions t...

One purpose of this study was to determine whether parental involvement, measured in late adolescence, mediates the relationship between delinquency in mid-adolescence and crime in early adulthood. This study's second purpose was to ascertain whether this relationship is moderated by sex, such that late adolescent parental involvement mediates the delinquency-crime relationship in females but n...

This paper investigates the link between youth unemployment and crime using a unique combination of labor market and conviction data spanning the entire Swedish working-age population over an extended period. The empirical analysis reveals large and statistically significant effects of unemployment on several types of crime. The magnitude of the effect is similar across different subgroups of t...

Violent youth crime generates significant media and public attention, particularly “gang”, or group, related crime and gun and knife crime. When young women are involved in violence, as perpetrators or instigators, this receives disproportionate coverage, drawing on a discourse of girls being “just as bad as the boys” (Burman et al.:2003, Miller:2001). Alongside this interest in girls’ particip...

Given the robust positive association between gangs and crime, a better understanding of factors related to reported youth gang membership is critical and especially since youth in gangs are a universal concern. The present study investigated the role of delinquency, proactive aggression, psychopathy and behavioral school engagement in reported youth gang membership using a large sample of 1027...

This paper examines perceptions of the criminal justice system held by young males using longitudinal survey data from the recent National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort and the National Youth Survey. First, a model is developed to study how perceptions respond to individual information about the probability of arrest and how perceptions a ect criminal behavior. Then, the model is sho...