"The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) demonstration assigned housing vouchers via random lottery to public housing residents in five cities. We use the exogenous variation in residential locations generated by MTO to estimate neighborhood effects on youth crime and delinquency. The offer to relocate to lower-poverty areas reduces arrests among female youth for violent and property crimes, relative to a control group. For males the offer to relocate reduces arrests for violent crime, at least in the short run, but increases problem behaviors and property crime arrests. The gender difference in treatment effects seems to reflect differences in how male and female youths from disadvantaged backgrounds adapt and respond to similar new neighborhood environments"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.
Even though youth crime rates have fallen since the mid-1990s, public fear and political rhetoric over the issue have heightened. The Columbine shootings and other sensational incidents add to the furor. Often overlooked are the underlying problems of child poverty, social disadvantage, and the pitfalls inherent to adolescent decisionmaking that contribute to youth crime. From a policy standpoint, adolescent offenders are caught in the crossfire between nurturance of youth and punishment of criminals, between rehabilitation and "get tough" pronouncements. In the midst of this emotional debate, the National Research Council's Panel on Juvenile Crime steps forward with an authoritative review of the best available data and analysis. Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents recommendations for addressing the many aspects of America's youth crime problem. This timely release discusses patterns and trends in crimes by children and adolescentsâ€"trends revealed by arrest data, victim reports, and other sources; youth crime within general crime; and race and sex disparities. The book explores desistanceâ€"the probability that delinquency or criminal activities decrease with ageâ€"and evaluates different approaches to predicting future crime rates. Why do young people turn to delinquency? Juvenile Crime, Juvenile Justice presents what we know and what we urgently need to find out about contributing factors, ranging from prenatal care, differences in temperament, and family influences to the role of peer relationships, the impact of the school policies toward delinquency, and the broader influences of the neighborhood and community. Equally important, this book examines a range of solutions: Prevention and intervention efforts directed to individuals, peer groups, and families, as well as day care-, school- and community-based initiatives. Intervention within the juvenile justice system. Role of the police. Processing and detention of youth offenders. Transferring youths to the adult judicial system. Residential placement of juveniles. The book includes background on the American juvenile court system, useful comparisons with the juvenile justice systems of other nations, and other important information for assessing this problem.
Juvenile Delinquency in a Diverse Society, Fourth Edition presents a fresh, critical examination of juvenile delinquency in the context of real communities and social policies - addressing many social factors that shape juvenile delinquency and its control, including race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. Authors Kristin A. Bates and Richelle S. Swan use true stories and contemporary examples to link theories of delinquency to current public policies and to existing community programs, encouraging readers to consider how theories of delinquency can be used to create new policies and programs in their own communities.
Over the last 25 years a vast body of literature has been published on neighbourhood effects: the idea that living in more deprived neighbourhoods has a negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their individual characteristics. The volume of work not only reflects academic and policy interest in this topic, but also the fact that we are still no closer to answering the question of how important neighbourhood effects actually are. There is little doubt that these effects exist, but we do not know enough about the causal mechanisms which produce them, their relative importance in shaping individual’s life chances, the circumstances or conditions under which they are most important, or the most effective policy responses. Collectively, the chapters in this book offer new perspectives on these questions, and refocus the academic debate on neighbourhood effects. The book enriches the neighbourhood effects literature with insights from a wide range of disciplines and countries.
How does growing up in a residential area with many juvenile delinquents affect the risk of future juvenile delinquency? Does it increase the risk? In general, it is hard to measure the effects of growing up in a residential area with many juvenile delinquents. It may well be the case that families in which the children face a high risk of juvenile delinquency have a higher tendency to settle in such locally chosen areas. Yet, this 'selection issue' did not exist in the specific case of children of refugees who were granted asylum in Denmark over the period of 1986 to 1998. The reason is that they did not choose where to settle in Denmark, but were placed in housing by the Danish Refugee Council. The analysis in this book examines the children of refugees and the probability rate of being convicted of crime committed over the 15-21 age interval if they were, as children, assigned to housing in a Danish municipality in which a high share of youth had been convicted of crime. (Series: The Rockwool Foundation Research Unit - Study Paper - No. 63)
Juvenile crime and violence has always piqued the public's interest. Indeed, each generation of Americans tends to define the youth crime problem as more serious than any previous generation. Even though juvenile homicides have been decreasing since the mid-1990s, the media is still quick to provide dramatic examples of juvenile monsters who are terrorizing their communities. Shootings at school, gang banging and trafficking drugs, school bullies, and charging juveniles as adults are subjects that have recently received wide media coverage. This three volume set on the nature, incidence, consequences, and treatment of youth crime and violence will help readers understand the true nature of youth crime and violence from a variety of perspectives. Each volume covers a different area and experts write on topics ranging from sex offending to fire starting, from gangs to guns, from juvenile probation to charging youths as adults, from mandatory mental health treatment to police in school settings, and more. What drives a teenager to steal? To kill? Why does youth crime and violence occur? Why are youths such vulnerable targets? What can be done to stop youth offenders, and what can be done to help youthful victims? How does the criminal justice system respond? What do communities do to punish and protect youths? What can schools do to intervene? All these questions and more are answered in this set on this timely and important topic. Our youth are our most precious commodity, and protecting vulnerable children as well as helping offenders is of paramount importance for steering them toward safe and productive lives. These volumes help readers better understand the causes and consequences of youth violence and crime and consider ways to address the problems.
Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.
This volume brings together a collection of essays, many of them scholarly classics, which form part of the debates on three questions central to criminal law theory. The first of these questions is: what conduct should be necessary for criminal liability, and what sufficient? The answer to this question has wider implications for the debate about morality enforcement given the concern that the "harm principle" may have collapsed under its own weight. Secondly, essays address the question of what culpability should be necessary for criminal liability, and what sufficient? Here, the battles continue over whether the formulation of doctrines - such as the insanity defense, criminal negligence, strict liability, and others - should ignore or minimize the extent of an offender's blameworthiness in the name of effective crime-control. Or, are methods of accommodating the tension now in sight? Finally, essays consider the question of how criminal law rules should be best organized into a coherent and clarifying doctrinal structure. The structure grown by the common law process competes not only with that of modern comprehensive codifications, such as the America Law Institute's Model Penal Code, but also with alternative structures imagined but not yet tried.
Changes over time in the levels and patterns of crime have significant consequences that affect not only the criminal justice system but also other critical policy sectors. Yet compared with such areas as health status, housing, and employment, the nation lacks timely information and comprehensive research on crime trends. Descriptive information and explanatory research on crime trends across the nation that are not only accurate, but also timely, are pressing needs in the nation's crime-control efforts. In April 2007, the National Research Council held a two-day workshop to address key substantive and methodological issues underlying the study of crime trends and to lay the groundwork for a proposed multiyear NRC panel study of these issues. Six papers were commissioned from leading researchers and discussed at the workshop by experts in sociology, criminology, law, economics, and statistics. The authors revised their papers based on the discussants' comments, and the papers were then reviewed again externally. The six final workshop papers are the basis of this volume, which represents some of the most serious thinking and research on crime trends currently available.
Delinquency Theories: Appraisals and applications provides a fulsome and accessible overview of contemporary theories of juvenile delinquency. The book opens with a comprehensive description of what a theory is, and explains how theories are created in the social sciences. Following on, each subsequent chapter is dedicated to describing an individual theory, broken down and illustrated within four distinct sections. Initially, each chapter tells the tale of a delinquent youth, and from this example a thorough review of the particular theory and related research can be undertaken to explain the youth’s delinquent behaviour. The third and fourth sections of each chapter critically analyze the theories, and provide a straightforward discussion of policy implications of each, thus encouraging readers to evaluate the usefulness of these theories and also to consider the relationship between theory and policy. This text is an invaluable resource for both undergraduate and graduate students of subjects such as youth justice, delinquency, social theory, and criminology.
