Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice

The role of gender is critical when examining how mental health problems affect delinquency over the life course. This study explores gender and developmental pathways to violence for youth participating in the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Girls having oppositional defiant problems (ODP) were significantly more likely to self-report violence from late childhood through early adolescence; however, only depressive problems mattered for girls during late adolescence. For boys, antisocial personality problems during late adolescence affected violence. Moderating effects of gender were limited to early and late adolescence. Implications regarding gendered solutions when developing strategies targeting youth violence are discussed.

A growing body of research has been dedicated to developing adolescent risk assessment instruments, but much of this research has been limited to short-term tests of predictive validity. The current study examined the predictive and incremental validity of the Youth Level of Service/ Case Management Inventory (YLS/CMI), Structured Assessment of Violence Risk in Youth (SAVRY), and Psychopathy Checklist: Youth Version (PCL:YV) in adolescent offenders over a mean 10-year follow-up period. Each instrument predicted general recidivism with moderate- (YLS/CMI area under the curve [AUC] = .66) -to-large effect sizes (SAVRY AUC = .74; PCL:YV AUC = .79). However, there was variation in predictive validity across types of recidivism, and all three instruments were better at predicting recidivism in males than females. SAVRY total also demonstrated incremental validity over its structured professional judgment of risk. Clinical implications and future directions for youth risk assessment are discussed.

The current study explores characteristics that are associated with fledgling psychopathy and educational outcomes relating to reading comprehension performance in a community sample of 432 middle school students. Latent class analysis (LCA) produced a four-class solution. Class 1 was a large (71.5% of sample) ‘‘control’’ group of youths with no attention/hyperactivity deficits and the highest reading comprehension scores. Class 2 was 11.6% of the sample and was consistent with traits associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) predominantly inattentive type. Class 3 was 7.4% of the sample and was consistent with traits associated with ADHD predominantly hyperactive—impulsive type. Class 4 was 9.5% of the sample and was consistent with traits associated with ADHD combined type. Classes 2 and 4 were characterized by elevated levels of psychopathic and callous-unemotional (CU) traits and lower educational performance. This study extends the utility of fledgling psychopathy to educational outcomes, which has broad implications for adolescent development, delinquency, and youth violence.

This study explores gendered and age-graded effects of key theoretical predictors of fear of crime among a panel of approximately 4,000 public middle and high school students in Kentucky. Theoretically, fear of school crime is presumed to be driven by individual-level indicators of vulnerability, as well as by school-level indicators of crime/disorder and social integration. Multilevel analysis revealed little effect of school-level contextual factors, whereas the key individual-level indicators of vulnerability were quite robust in their effects across male and female students. Further analysis, however, revealed that school context in the form of school-level delinquency significantly moderated the effect of individual-level perceived risk of victimization on fear for female students especially. Results provided little evidence of age-dependent correlates. In one exception, the positive effect of perceived risk of victimization on both male and female student fear declined, as students moved from the 7th grade to the 10th grade.

Most organizational theories assume that agency partnerships within a system are seamless and tightly fit. Through qualitative interviews with program personnel, this study measured the extent to which juvenile probation and police partnerships were characterized as a ‘‘loosely coupled system.’’ Loosely coupled systems were measured by each agency’s willingness to share information, willingness to share power, flexibility in decision making, open communication without fear of reprisal, valuing diverse backgrounds of outside agencies, and degree of mutual commitment toward a common goal. Evidence to support the existence of a loosely coupled system was the willingness of officers to expand and broaden their traditional roles and appropriately share power, such that there was no mission distortion and role confusion observed. Information sharing efforts had a significant impact on dissolving old ways of thinking about traditional roles and instead built a new sense of trust, improved morale, and greater access to information.