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 offending and anti-social behavior are enormous societal concerns. This broad-reaching volume summarizes the current evidence on prevention, diversion, causes, and rates of delinquency, as well as assessment of risk and intervention needs. A distinguished cast of contributors from law, psychology, and psychiatry describe what we know about interventions in school, community, and residential contexts, focusing particularly on interventions that are risk reducing and cost effective. Equally important, each chapter comments on what is not well supported through research, distinguishing aspects of current practice that are likely to be effective from those that are not and mapping new directions for research, policy, and practice. Finally, the volume provides a description of a model curriculum for training legal and mental health professionals on conducting relevant assessments of adolescents for the courts. Effectively bridging research and practice, this will be an important resource for legal and mental health professionals involved in the juvenile justice system, policy makers seeking humane but effective interventions in the context of society's need for safety, and those involved in teaching about and training in juvenile delinquency.

This work offers complete description and scholarly analysis of major delinquency prevention and control programmes. It links what has been done in the past with what should be done in the future, concluding with directions for future prevention and control efforts.

Adolescence is a distinct, yet transient, period of development between childhood and adulthood characterized by increased experimentation and risk-taking, a tendency to discount long-term consequences, and heightened sensitivity to peers and other social influences. A key function of adolescence is developing an integrated sense of self, including individualization, separation from parents, and personal identity. Experimentation and novelty-seeking behavior, such as alcohol and drug use, unsafe sex, and reckless driving, are thought to serve a number of adaptive functions despite their risks. Research indicates that for most youth, the period of risky experimentation does not extend beyond adolescence, ceasing as identity becomes settled with maturity. Much adolescent involvement in criminal activity is part of the normal developmental process of identity formation and most adolescents will mature out of these tendencies. Evidence of significant changes in brain structure and function during adolescence strongly suggests that these cognitive tendencies characteristic of adolescents are associated with biological immaturity of the brain and with an imbalance among developing brain systems. This imbalance model implies dual systems: one involved in cognitive and behavioral control and one involved in socio-emotional processes. Accordingly adolescents lack mature capacity for self-regulations because the brain system that influences pleasure-seeking and emotional reactivity develops more rapidly than the brain system that supports self-control. This knowledge of adolescent development has underscored important differences between adults and adolescents with direct bearing on the design and operation of the justice system, raising doubts about the core assumptions driving the criminalization of juvenile justice policy in the late decades of the 20th century. It was in this context that the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) asked the National Research Council to convene a committee to conduct a study of juvenile justice reform. The goal of Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach was to review recent advances in behavioral and neuroscience research and draw out the implications of this knowledge for juvenile justice reform, to assess the new generation of reform activities occurring in the United States, and to assess the performance of OJJDP in carrying out its statutory mission as well as its potential role in supporting scientifically based reform efforts.

Criminology has experienced tremendous growth over the last few decades, evident, in part, by the widespread popularity and increased enrollment in criminology and criminal justice departments at the undergraduate and graduate levels across the U.S. and internationally. Evolutionary paradigmatic shift has accompanied this surge in definitional, disciplinary and pragmatic terms. Though long identified as a leading sociological specialty area, criminology has emerged as a stand-alone discipline in its own right, one that continues to grow and is clearly here to stay. Criminology, today, remains inherently theoretical but is also far more applied in focus and thus more connected to the academic and practitioner concerns of criminal justice and related professional service fields. Contemporary criminology is also increasingly interdisciplinary and thus features a broad variety of ideological orientations to and perspectives on the causes, effects and responses to crime. 21st Century Criminology: A Reference Handbook provides straightforward and definitive overviews of 100 key topics comprising traditional criminology and its modern outgrowths. The individual chapters have been designed to serve as a "first-look" reference source for most criminological inquires. Both connected to the sociological origins of criminology (i.e., theory and research methods) and the justice systems′ response to crime and related social problems, as well as coverage of major crime types, this two-volume set offers a comprehensive overview of the current state of criminology. From student term papers and masters theses to researchers commencing literature reviews, 21st Century Criminology is a ready source from which to quickly access authoritative knowledge on a range of key issues and topics central to contemporary criminology. This two-volume set in the SAGE 21st Century Reference Series is intended to provide undergraduate majors with an authoritative reference source that will serve their research needs with more detailed information than encyclopedia entries but not so much jargon, detail, or density as a journal article or research handbook chapter. 100 entries or "mini-chapters" highlight the most important topics, issues, questions, and debates any student obtaining a degree in this field ought to have mastered for effectiveness in the 21st century. Curricular-driven, chapters provide students with initial footholds on topics of interest in researching term papers, in preparing for GREs, in consulting to determine directions to take in pursuing a senior thesis, graduate degree, career, etc. Comprehensive in coverage, major sections include The Discipline of Criminology, Correlates of Crime, Theories of Crime & Justice, Measurement & Research, Types of Crime, and Crime & the Justice System. The contributor group is comprised of well-known figures and emerging young scholars who provide authoritative overviews coupled with insightful discussion that will quickly familiarize researchers, students, and general readers alike with fundamental and detailed information for each topic. Uniform chapter structure makes it easy for students to locate key information, with most chapters following a format of Introduction, Theory, Methods, Applications, Comparison, Future Directions, Summary, Bibliography & Suggestions for Further Reading, and Cross References. Availability in print and electronic formats provides students with convenient, easy access wherever they may be.

The Panel on Juvenile Crime: Prevention, Treatment, and Control convened a workshop on October 2, 1998, to explore issues related to educational performance, school climate, school practices, learning, student motivation and commitment to school, and their relationship to delinquency. The workshop was designed to bring together researchers and practitioners with a broad range of perspectives on the relationship between such specific issues as school safety and academic achievement and the development of delinquent behavior. Education and Delinquency reviews recent research findings, identifies gaps in knowledge and promising areas of future research, and discusses the need for program evaluation and the integration of empirical research findings into program design.