Abstract
Juveniles with conduct problems who are engaged in delinquent acts demand an enormous amount of time, energy, and resources from parents, teachers, and community service agencies. Professionals charged with the care of these youth require a strong commitment to promoting child development. That is, no matter how discrepant the youth is from normative peers, the aim of an evidence-based treatment is to move the youth along the developmental path toward age-appropriate skills. It is, therefore, an essential minimum requirement to understand not only what promotes typical child development (cf. Brazelton & Greenspan, 2000) but also the experiences that can interfere with development and result in the presence of psychopathology.
When examining conduct problems in juveniles, readers need to be familiar with the concepts of (a) promotive factors that explain nondelinquency, (b) protective factors that explain desistance from delinquency, as well as (c) the reality that there are a large variety of risks that combine to result in conduct problems and delinquency (i.e., equifinality) but may also result in a different psychopathology altogether (i.e., multifinality). That is, understanding and treating juvenile conduct problems and delinquency is a task that must accommodate the reality of the heterogeneity of difficulties this group exhibits. Furthermore, addressing complexity in treatment protocols is only one challenge. Delivering services after incarceration with the goal of successfully promoting reentry toward a nondelinquent lifestyle is a difficult endeavor for treatment teams. Finally, developing support systems that are capable of promoting and sustaining the youth’s positive life course is especially challenging.
This issue tackles the complexities associated with conduct problems and delinquency in youth directly. For example, “Heterogeneity in Drug Abuse Among Juvenile Offenders: Is Mixture Regression More Informative Than Standard Regression?” correctly highlights the variability in juvenile offenders. In addition to suggestions about how to statistically measure and manage this diverse data, the authors provide suggestions about how to explain results so that they are meaningful to clinicians and policy makers. “Assessing Empathy in Salvadoran High-Risk and Gang-Involved Adolescents and Young Adults: A Spanish Validation of the Basic Empathy Scale” advances the field in several ways. First, the data provided extend the measurement of emotional and cognitive empathy in youth to an international sample. Second, conclusions lend support to the research base showing that failure to adequately develop empathy is associated with high rates of aggression, delinquency, and recidivism (Frick, O’Brien, Wootton, & McBurnett, 1994; Kerig & Stellwagon, 2010; Manti, Scholte, Van Berckelaer-Onnes, & VanDerPloeg, 2009). Authors of the “Short-Term General Recidivism Risk of Juvenile Sex Offenders: Validation of the Washington State Juvenile Court Prescreen Assessment” article provide a good argument for measuring risk for general (nonsexual) offenses in addition to risk for a variety of sexual reoffenses in a group of juvenile sexual offenders. Specifically, the authors expand the simplistic, often mechanistic, risk evaluation process to reflect the range of outcomes that clinicians and decision makers consider during conditional release procedures.
Desistance from delinquency is emphasized in the article “Addressing Criminality in Childhood: Is Responsivity the Central Issue?” in which the authors provide support for the popular responsivity model for use with very young children. These authors describe the relevant contributions between the applied treatment and the outcome for a group likely to respond differentially to treatment protocols. Also, importantly, the authors do not camouflage the need to discuss findings showing that types of behavior problems are relatively stable even in young children (Keenan et al., 2011; Lynam et al., 2009). The “Parents’ Perceptions of Their Adolescent Sons’ Recovery in a Therapeutic Community for Addicted Clients” article shows how some families perceive the recovery process for the child and family. Taken together, these articles encourage readers to consider how tailored treatments should be considered alongside efforts to enlist and ensure positive parent relationships so that these youth’s newly learned skills are rewarded and reinforced in their family environment.
Reflecting on how new research findings are situated in an established heuristic is a useful habit. Refreshing our commitment to evaluating how theory informs practice and empirical results clarify theory keeps the field honest and ethical. The authors in this issue recommit themselves to the challenge to provide results that will be meaningful for youth in the juvenile justice system. They also acknowledge that there is no single effort that can account for the complexities in juvenile offending; however, each article in this issue adds incrementally toward a more complete literature base.