Violence and traumatic stress negatively affect physical health in youth. Incarcerated adolescents have high rates of violence exposure and health problems, however, few studies have examined medical records and violence exposure in this high-risk population. Self-reported violence exposure and symptoms of stress were collected in 115 incarcerated…

Background: Although there are concerns regarding the use of restrictive housing with detained youth, little research has examined factors that contribute to youth risk for restrictive housing. Objective: The current study examined whether perceived containment and contextual factors (i.e., peer delinquency, neighborhood problems, stressful life…

The use of mental health-related intake assessments by juvenile correctional facilities as predictive measures of confinement behavior has seen limited use in recent years. This study employs the Massachusetts Youth Screening Instrument-Version 2 (MAYSI-2) and How I Think Questionnaire (HIT) as measurement tools on the same data set to assess the…

The aim of this study was to analyse predictors of behaviour change among children at risk in juvenile rehabilitation centres within Nairobi County, Kenya. The target population was all the children and managers of Juvenile rehabilitation Centres in Nairobi County. This consisted of 380 boys, 160 girls, 8 managers in Kabete and Getathuru, and 4…

Background: Although prior studies have shown that detained females are marked by significant adverse circumstances, little is known about their adult outcomes. Method: Prospective follow-up study of 184 (80.4% of original sample of 229) detained adolescent females who were reassessed 4.5 SD = 0.6) years later in young adulthood (mean age = 20.0,…

A detailed examination was conducted of the factors associated with pre- and postadjudication secure detention, including secure detention as a dispositional sentence and the effects of secure detention on decision making that further contribute to cumulative disadvantage for African Americans. The research was based on interpretations of the…

The term and construct "school-to-prison" pipeline has been widely used by advocates, researchers, and policymakers to describe the relationship between school disciplinary practices and increased risk of juvenile justice contact. It has been unclear whether the construct is a useful heuristic or a descriptor of empirically validated…

The "Delinquency Reduction Outcome Profile" ("DROP") is a novel situational-judgment test (SJT) designed to measure social decision making in delinquent youth. The DROP includes both a typical SJT scoring method, which captures the deviation of an individual response from an "ideal" expert-based response pattern, as well as a novel…

This study examined factors influencing clinician predictions of recidivism for juvenile offenders, including youth age at initial juvenile justice system involvement, youth age at discharge, program completion status, clinician perception of strength of the therapeutic relationship, and clinician perception of youth commitment to treatment.…

Despite general consensus over the value of measuring self-reported offending, discrepancies exist in methods of scoring self-reported offending and the length of the reference period over which offending is assessed. This analysis compared the concurrent interassociations and longitudinal predictive strength of diversity, frequency, and severity…

Sixty youth (16-19 years) from two youth prison sites participate in a prospective study examining criminal offending and learning disabilities (LD), completing measures of estimated IQ, attention, reading, and mathematical and oral language abilities. Prevalence rates of LDs exceed those of international studies, with 91.67% of the offenders…

Despite the growth of Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander (NHOPI) youths in court and correctional involvement, studies of their delinquency and juvenile justice involvement are quite limited, and the literature becomes almost nonexistent when examining gender differences. Using case file analysis of 150 Native Hawaiian/part-Hawaiian and…

A wide variety of theoretical perspectives have been found to have an association with substance abuse. Most of these studies use data from samples of public school students and thus capture only part of the youth population. Using data from approximately 800 delinquents incarcerated in a Midwestern state, we examine the association between…

Juvenile offenders are costly to our society in terms of the monetary and social expenditures from the legal system, victims' person costs, and incarceration. The re-entry and community reintegration outcomes for formerly incarcerated youth with a disabling condition are bleak compared to peers without disabilities. In this study, we examined the…

Studies identifying the mechanisms underlying the causes and consequences of antisocial behavior among female delinquents as they transit to adulthood are scarce and have important limitations: Most are based on official statistics, they typically are restricted to normative samples, and rarely do they gather prospective data from samples of…