The Departments of Education and Justice are responsible for enforcing certain federal civil rights laws that prohibit discrimination in K-12 schools based on characteristics such as race, sex, and disability, including regarding police interactions with students. The House committee report for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services,…

Criminal activity is seasonal, peaking in the summer and declining through the winter. We provide the first evidence that arrests of children and reported crimes involving children follow a different pattern: peaking during the school year and declining in the summer. We use a regression discontinuity design surrounding the exact start and end…

Young people's encounters with the criminal justice system generally begin with the police. Officers' decisions about how to handle these encounters are affected by their on-the-spot assessments of young people's proclivity for delinquency, prospects for rehabilitation, and overall moral character. And because most police-citizen interactions…

Adolescent behavior now occurs offline and online. Frequently studied and treated independently, the relationship between offline problem behaviors and online risk taking is not well understood. This study asked whether there are any problematic behaviors predictive of online risk taking by high school students. Using a 2009 dataset of 2,077 high…

Although research on sensitive topics has produced a large body of knowledge on how to improve the quality of self-reported data, little is known regarding the sensitivity of offending questions, and much less is known regarding how topic sensitivity is affected by recall periods. In this study, we developed a multi-dimensional assessment of item…

This article analyzes Julio's counter-storytelling narratives as an undocumented and Latino youth attending schools in the Southeast. Through his narratives, this case study discusses how gender, accent, socioeconomic and immigration status intersect multiple layers of discrimination, pushing Julio out of school prior to his self-deportation. The…

Schools are an important part of any community, and are increasingly considered responsible for the social education of young people as much as their academic instruction. In doing so, many schools have adopted a 'zero tolerance' response to student conduct that involves harsh penalties for minor infractions. At the heart of this zero tolerance…

In the United States, more than 70 million students are enrolled in public elementary and secondary (K-12) schools or degree-granting postsecondary institutions. School and campus safety and security for these students encompasses many issues, including violence prevention and response, school climate, and the physical and mental health of the…

Background: There is now substantial literature demonstrating that a disproportionate number of young people who come into contact with youth justice services evidence unidentified language difficulties. These young people, therefore, have received little or no professional input in this area. Conversely, there is a dearth of research pertaining…

In the context of juvenile justice, writes Traci Schlesinger, "diversion" can mean two things. Informal diversion includes police officers' decisions to warn and release, probation officers' decisions not to report violations, prosecutors' decisions not to prosecute, and judges' decisions to dismiss cases. Informal diversion sends youth…

This study examined multiple risk behaviors (violence, delinquency, and substance use) among 240 African American and 262 Hispanic preadolescent boys from urban schools in the Midwest United States. Latent transition analysis allowed patterns of multivariate risk to emerge uniquely within and across these ethnic groups, highlighting patterns for…

Objectives: To describe the rates of anti-social behaviour (ASB) among adolescents with/without mild/moderate intellectual disability (MMID). To estimate whether any differences could be attributable to differences in exposure to extraneous risk factors. Design: Secondary analysis of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England. Methods:…

Using latent class analysis (LCA), this study identified a dyadic taxonomy of delinquent youth categorized by varying types of maternal-youth reporting discrepancies (i.e., youth < maternal, youth > maternal) within a sample of 764 14-year-old high-risk youth. Four distinctive subgroups of youth were identified, two of which reported more…

Teaching writing to students of high need in an urban school is simultaneously pedagogical, curricular, and political. Students labeled "at-risk" for school failure often have lowered expectations placed upon them from without that impact how they feel within. Compounding this problem of perception is the real issue of heightened…

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people are substantially over-represented in the juvenile justice system in Australia, and this over-representation is highest in the most serious processes and outcomes--particularly in detention. This bulletin examines the numbers and characteristics of Indigenous young people in the juvenile justice…