Example: barber

Child Delinquency: Early Intervention and Prevention

Bulletin Department of JusticeOffice of Justice ProgramsOffice of Juvenile Justice and delinquency Prevention J. Robert Flores, AdministratorMay 2003 Sparked by high-profile cases involvingchildren who commit violent crimes, pub-lic concerns regarding Child delinquentshave escalated. Compared with juvenileswho first become involved in delinquencyin their teens, Child delinquents (offendersyounger than age 13) face a much greaterrisk of becoming serious, violent, andchronic juvenile offenders. OJJDP formedthe Study Group on Very Young Offendersto explore what is known about the prev-alence and frequency of very youngoffending, investigate how very youngoffenders are handled by various systems( , juvenile justice, mental health, andsocial services), and determine effectivemethods for preventing very young of-fending.

nature of child delinquency, its develop-mental course, key risk and protective factors, and effective interventions. Child delinquency is an enduring and troubling phenomenon that requires more research and the efforts of a broader community to be fully under-stood and addressed. The work summa-rized in this Bulletin helps to advance

Tags:

  Interventions, Delinquency

Information

Domain:

Source:

Link to this page:

Please notify us if you found a problem with this document:

Other abuse

Transcription of Child Delinquency: Early Intervention and Prevention

1 Bulletin Department of JusticeOffice of Justice ProgramsOffice of Juvenile Justice and delinquency Prevention J. Robert Flores, AdministratorMay 2003 Sparked by high-profile cases involvingchildren who commit violent crimes, pub-lic concerns regarding Child delinquentshave escalated. Compared with juvenileswho first become involved in delinquencyin their teens, Child delinquents (offendersyounger than age 13) face a much greaterrisk of becoming serious, violent, andchronic juvenile offenders. OJJDP formedthe Study Group on Very Young Offendersto explore what is known about the prev-alence and frequency of very youngoffending, investigate how very youngoffenders are handled by various systems( , juvenile justice, mental health, andsocial services), and determine effectivemethods for preventing very young of-fending.

2 The Study Group identified par-ticular risk and protective factors that arecrucial to developing Early interventionand protection programs for very youngoffenders. This Bulletin, the first in OJJDP s ChildDelinquency Series, offers valuable infor-mation on the nature of Child delinquencyand describes Early Intervention and pre-vention programs that effectively reducedelinquent behavior. Subsequent Bulletinswill present the latest information aboutchild delinquency , including analyses ofchild delinquency statistics, insights intothe Early origins of very young offending,and descriptions of Early interventionprograms and approaches that work toprevent the development of delinquentbehavior by focusing on risk and protec-tive Key FindingsThe number of Child delinquents1(ju-veniles between the ages of 7 and 12)handled in the nation s juvenile courtshas increased 33 percent over the lastdecade (Snyder, 2001).

3 This develop-ment is cause for concern not onlybecause offense patterns reflect moreserious crimes among these youngsters,but also because these very young of-fenders are more likely to continue theirinvolvement in crime. Child delinquentsare two to three times more likely tobecome serious, violent, and chronicoffenders2than adolescents whosedelinquent behavior begins in theirJuvenile courts are being challengedby an increase in the number of childdelinquents coming before them. In1997 alone, juvenile courts handledmore than 180,000 juvenile offendersyounger than 13 years old. Thesechild delinquents account for 1 in 3juvenile arrests for arson, 1 in 5 juve-nile arrests for sex offenses, and 1 in12 juvenile arrests for violent crime.

4 Because youth referred to juvenilecourt before the age of 13 are farmore likely to become chronic juve-nile offenders than youth whoseinitial contact occurs at a later age,there is reason for concern about thegrowing number of Child Bulletin summarizes the finalreport of OJJDP s Study Group onVery Young Offenders, Child Delin-quents: Development, Intervention ,and Service report drawson hundreds of studies to describethe developmental course of childdelinquency and delineate key riskand protective factors. It also identi-fies effective and promising preven-tion and Intervention programs thathelp reduce the incidence of delin-quency while offering significantcost savings to information provided by thefindings of the Study Group on VeryYoung Offenders demonstrates theneed to invest in effective Early pre-vention and Intervention efforts withsuch children.

5 Child delinquency : EarlyIntervention and PreventionRolf Loeber, David P. Farrington, and David Petechuk 1 Child delinquents are not legally defined in thesame way across the United States (Snyder andSickmund, 1999; Wiig, 2001). For example, the mini-mum age of criminal responsibility varies from age 6in North Carolina to age 10 in Arkansas and addition, many states do not have a legally definedage of criminal responsibility. In this Bulletin, childdelinquents are defined as juveniles between theages of 7 and 12, inclusive, who have committed adelinquent act according to criminal law an actthat would be a crime if committed by an offenders are defined here as those with atleast four referrals to juvenile OJJDP publications online at Recent high-profile media cases ofviolence committed by children age 12or younger also have drawn attention tothe potential for Child delinquents toinflict deadly harm.

6 For these reasonsalone, Child delinquents represent asignificant concern for both societyand the juvenile justice arrest rate of Child delinquentschanged between 1988 and 1997: arrestsfor violent crimes increased by 45 per-cent (paralleling the increase in vio-lence for all juveniles) and drug abuseviolations increased by 156 percent. Incontrast, arrests for property crimesdecreased by 17 percent (Snyder, 2001).The Denver Youth Survey, which is afollowup study of more than 1,500 high-risk youth, showed that at ages 11 12,about 10 percent of boys and girls hadapolice contact because of delinquency (Espiritu et al.)

7 , 2001). The total volume of Child delinquencycases handled in the juvenile courtsis large. In 1997, an estimated 181,300delinquents were less than 13 years oldat the time of court intake (Butts andSnyder, 1997; Snyder, 2001). Youth re-ferred to court for a delinquency of-fense for the first time before the ageof 13 were far more likely to becomechronic juvenile offenders than youthfirst referred to court at an older age(see figure 1). It is important to notethat because the upper age of juvenilecourt jurisdiction generally is 17, olderfirst-time delinquents have fewer yearsof opportunity to develop into chronicjuvenile offenders.

8 Figure 2 shows the overlap betweenjuvenile offenders and serious, violent,and chronic offenders for two groups: Child delinquents and older onsetdelinquents. A larger proportion ofchild delinquents, compared with lateronset delinquents, become serious,violent, and chronic offenders. Also, ahigher proportion of the violent childdelinquents become chronic offenders. Child delinquents have their own typi-caloffense profile. They account forone-third of all juvenile arrests for arson,one-fifth of juvenile arrests for sexoffenses and vandalism, one-eighth ofjuvenile arrests for burglary and forc-ible rape, and one-twelfth of juvenilearrests for violent crime (Snyder, 2001).

9 This Bulletin summarizes the final re-port of the Office of Juvenile Justiceand delinquency Prevention s (OJJDP s)Study Group on Very Young Offenders(the Study Group). See the box onpage 3 for more information on the StudyFigure 1: Proportion of delinquency Careers That Eventually Had Fouror More delinquency Referrals, by Age at First Referral0102030407891011121314151617 Age at First ReferralPercentage of Careers With Four or More ReferralsNote: The proportion of careers with four or more referrals is likely to be underestimated for thefirst bar in this graph. Coding errors in the birth dates of a small number of youth first referred atage 17 caused them to be misclassified with an onset age of : Snyder, DelinquentsSeriousChronicViolentChronicS eriousViolentOlder OnsetDelinquentsFigure 2: Very Young Offenders Have a Greater Percentage ofSerious, Violent, and Chronic Careers Than Older OnsetDelinquentsSource: Snyder, The report, Child Delinquents.

10 Development, Intervention , and ServiceNeeds(Loeber and Farrington, 2001), isthe first volume published that pre-sents empirical information on childdelinquents from hundreds of studies,including data from several studiesthat were newly analyzed for the summarizes knowledge concerning thenature of Child delinquency , its develop-mental course, key risk and protectivefactors, and effective delinquency is an enduring andtroubling phenomenon that requiresmore research and the efforts of abroader community to be fully under-stood and addressed. The work summa-rized in this Bulletin helps to advanceknowledge about Child delinquents andabout fair and effective ways to dealwith the Scope ofVery Young OffendersThe Study Group was concerned withthree categories of children: Serious Child delinquentswho havecommitted one or more of the follow-ing acts: homicide, aggravated assault,robbery, rape, or serious arson.


Related search queries