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Full-Text Articles in Law
Justice Policy Reform For High-Risk Juveniles: Using Science To Achieve Large-Scale Crime Reduction, Jennifer L. Skeem, Elizabeth S. Scott, Edward Mulvey
Justice Policy Reform For High-Risk Juveniles: Using Science To Achieve Large-Scale Crime Reduction, Jennifer L. Skeem, Elizabeth S. Scott, Edward Mulvey
Faculty Scholarship
After a distinctly punitive era, a period of remarkable reform in juvenile crime regulation has begun. Practical urgency has fueled interest in both crime reduction and research on the prediction and malleability of criminal behavior. In this rapidly changing context, high-risk youth – the small proportion of the population where crime is concentrated – present a conundrum. Research indicates that these are precisely the individuals to intensively treat to maximize crime reduction, but there are both real and imagined barriers to doing so. Institutional placement or criminal court processing can exclude these youths from interventions that would better protect public …
Moral Disengagement Among Serious Juvenile Offenders: A Longitudinal Study Of The Relations Between Morally Disengaged Attitudes And Offending, Jeffrey Fagan, Elizabeth P. Shulman, Elizabeth Cauffman, Alex R. Piquero
Moral Disengagement Among Serious Juvenile Offenders: A Longitudinal Study Of The Relations Between Morally Disengaged Attitudes And Offending, Jeffrey Fagan, Elizabeth P. Shulman, Elizabeth Cauffman, Alex R. Piquero
Faculty Scholarship
The present study investigates the relation between moral disengagement – one’s willingness to conditionally endorse transgressive behavior – and ongoing offending in a sample of adolescent male felony offenders (N=1,169). In addition, the study attempts to rule out callous-unemotional traits as a third variable responsible for observed associations between moral disengagement and offending. A bivariate latent change score analysis suggests that reduction in moral disengagement helps to speed decline in self-reported antisocial behavior, even after adjusting for the potential confound of callous-unemotional traits. Declines in moral disengagement are also associated with declining likelihood of offending, based on official records. Given …
The Contradictions Of Juvenile Crime & Punishment, Jeffrey Fagan
The Contradictions Of Juvenile Crime & Punishment, Jeffrey Fagan
Faculty Scholarship
This essay explores the contradictions and puzzles of modern juvenile justice, and illustrates the enduring power of the child-saving philosophy of the juvenile court in an era of punitiveness toward offenders both young and old. The exponential growth in incarceration in the U.S. since the 1970s has been more restrained for juveniles than adults, even in the face of a youth violence epidemic that lasted for nearly a decade. Rhetoric has grown harsher in the wake of moral panics about youth crime, juvenile codes now express the language of retribution and incapacitation, yet the growth in incarceration of juveniles was …
Building Criminal Capital Behind Bars: Peer Effects In Juvenile Corrections, Patrick J. Bayer, Randi Hjalmarsson, David Pozen
Building Criminal Capital Behind Bars: Peer Effects In Juvenile Corrections, Patrick J. Bayer, Randi Hjalmarsson, David Pozen
Faculty Scholarship
This paper analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. These data provide a complete record of past crimes, facility assignments, and arrests and adjudications in the year following release for each individual. To control for the non-random assignment to facilities, we include facility and facility-by-prior offense fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer …
Rational Choice And Developmental Influences On Recidivism Among Adolescent Felony Offenders, Jeffrey Fagan, Alex R. Piquero
Rational Choice And Developmental Influences On Recidivism Among Adolescent Felony Offenders, Jeffrey Fagan, Alex R. Piquero
Faculty Scholarship
Recent law and scholarship has claimed that the developmental limitations of adolescents affect their capacity for control and decision making with respect to crime, diminishing their culpability and reducing their exposure to punishment. Social science has focused on two concurrent adolescent developmental influence: the internalization of legal rules and norms that regulate social and antisocial behaviors, and the development of rational thought to frame behavioral choices and decisions. The interaction of these two developmental processes, and the identification of one domain of socialization and development as the primary source of motivation or restraint in adolescence, is the focus of this …
Public Attitudes About The Culpability And Punishment Of Young Offenders, Elizabeth S. Scott, N. Dickon Reppucci, Jill Antonishak, Jennifer T. Degennaro
Public Attitudes About The Culpability And Punishment Of Young Offenders, Elizabeth S. Scott, N. Dickon Reppucci, Jill Antonishak, Jennifer T. Degennaro
Faculty Scholarship
Conventional wisdom holds that the public supports harsh punishment of juvenile offenders, and politicians often argue that the public demands tough policies. But public opinion is usually gauged through simplistic polls, often conducted in the wake of highly publicized violent crimes by juveniles. This study seeks to probe public opinion about the culpability of young offenders as compared to adult counterparts through more nuanced and comprehensive measures in a neutral setting (i.e. not in response to a high profile crime or during a political campaign when the media focuses on the issue). The opinions of 788 community adults were individually …
Legal Socialization Of Children And Adolescents, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler
Legal Socialization Of Children And Adolescents, Jeffrey Fagan, Tom Tyler
Faculty Scholarship
Research on children and the law has recently renewed its focus on the development of children's ties to law and legal actors. We identify the developmental process through which these relations develop as legal socialization, a process that unfolds during childhood and adolescence as part of a vector of developmental capital that promotes compliance with the law and cooperation with legal actors. In this paper, we show that ties to the law and perceptions of law and legal actors among children and adolescents change over time and age. We show that neighborhood contexts and experiences with legal actors shape the …
Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions And Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik, Akiva Liberman
Be Careful What You Wish For: Legal Sanctions And Public Safety Among Adolescent Offenders In Juvenile And Criminal Court, Jeffrey Fagan, Aaron Kupchik, Akiva Liberman
Faculty Scholarship
Three decades of legislative activism have resulted in a broad expansion of states' authority to transfer adolescent offenders from juvenile to criminal (adult) courts. At the same time that legislatures have broadened the range of statutes and lowered the age thresholds for eligibility for transfer, states also have reallocated discretion away from judges and instituted simplified procedures that permit prosecutors to elect whether adolescents are prosecuted and sentenced in juvenile or criminal court. These developments reflect popular and political concerns that relatively lenient or attenuated punishment in juvenile court violates proportionality principles for serious crimes committed by adolescents, and is …