The Pathways to Desistance study is a multi-site, longitudinal study of serious adolescent offenders as they transition from adolescence into early adulthood. Between November, 2000 and January, 2003, 1,354 adjudicated youths from the juvenile and adult court systems in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona (N = 654) and Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania (N = 700) were enrolled into the study.The enrolled youth were at least 14 years old and under 18 years old at the time of their committing offense and were found guilty of a serious offense (predominantly felonies, with a few exceptions for some misdemeanor property offenses, sexual assault, or weapons offenses).Each study participant was followed for a period of seven years past enrollment, with the end result a comprehensive picture of life changes in a wide array of areas over the course of this time.The study sought to inform the ongoing debate in the juvenile justice system regarding the treatment and processing of serious adolescent offenders. The larger aim of the Pathways series is to improve decision-making by court and social service personnel and to clarify policy debates about alternatives for serious adolescent offenders.Additional datasets from the Pathways study will be released during 2013. These datasets will include official records information (e.g. re-arrest, placement), and monthly life-calendar data on a range of topics (e.g. school, work). These additional datasets will not be publicly available, but rather made available through ICPSR's restricted data access system.For more information, please visit the Research on Pathways to Desistance web site.

This collection includes data collected from a subsample of participants interviewed near the end of the thirteenth follow-up of the Northwestern Juvenile Project (NJP). NJP is a longitudinal assessment of alcohol, drug, and mental health service needs and outcomes of juvenile detainees. The thirteenth follow-up occurred approximately 16 years after the baseline interview. The subsample of participants received two additional modules that were added to the interview. These interview modules, the Juvenile Justice Experiences module and the Weapons-Related Injury module, retrospectively assessed behaviors and experiences during adolescence. The original NJP sample included 1,829 randomly selected youth recruited at intake to the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center (CCJTDC) in Chicago, Illinois from 1995 to 1998. The sample was stratified by gender, race/ethnicity, age, and legal status (for a total of 13 strata) to obtain enough participants to examine key subgroups. Both additional modules were administered at follow-up thirteen to a subsample 389 participants. The Juvenile Justice Experiences module assessed experiences with corrections in the juvenile justice system. Items were drawn from the Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) which ask a series of questions covering an individual's emotion and mental states among youth who are in custody. NJP utilized a modified SYRP to assess juvenile justice experiences retrospectively among the sample. The Weapons-Related Injury module was created for the NJP, and assesses gunshot-related and stabbing-related victimization during adolescence.

The goal of this study was to test specific hypotheses illustrating the relationships among serious victimization experiences, the mental health effects of victimization, substance abuse/use, and delinquent behavior in adolescents. The study assessed familial and nonfamilial types of violence. It was designed as a telephone survey of American youth aged 12-17 living in United States households and residing with a parent or guardian. One parent or guardian in each household was interviewed briefly to establish rapport, secure permission to interview the targeted adolescent, and to ensure the collection of comparative data to examine potential nonresponse bias from households without adolescent participation. All interviews with both parents and adolescents were conducted using Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) technology. From the surveys of parents and adolescents, the principal investigators created one data file by attaching the data from the parents to the records of their respective adolescents. Adolescents were asked whether violence and drug abuse were problems in their schools and communities and what types of violence they had personally witnessed. They were also asked about other stressful events in their lives, such as the loss of a family member, divorce, unemployment, moving to a new home or school, serious illness or injury, and natural disaster. Questions regarding history of sexual assault, physical assault, and harsh physical discipline elicited a description of the event and perpetrator, extent of injuries, age at abuse, whether alcohol or drugs were involved, and who was informed of the incident. Information was also gathered on the delinquent behavior of respondents and their friends, including destruction of property, assault, theft, sexual assault, and gang activity. Other questions covered history of personal and family substance use and mental health indicators, such as major depression, post-traumatic stress disorders, weight changes, sleeping disorders, and problems concentrating. Demographic information was gathered from the adolescents on age, race, gender, number of people living in household, and grade in school. Parents were asked whether they were concerned about violent crime, affordable child care, drug abuse, educational quality, gangs, and the safety of their children at school. In addition, they were questioned about their own victimization experiences and whether they discussed personal safety issues with their children. Parents also supplied demographic information on gender, marital status, number of children, employment status, education, race, and income.

Characteristics of juvenile offenders.

A major goal of juvenile justice reform is to reduce reoffending and recidivism among juvenile offenders. Advocates of trauma informed practices assert that disproportionately high rates of violence exposure and trauma symptoms exacerbate the delinquent and violent behavior of juvenile offenders, but there is little evidence of the role of trauma in reoffending, particularly for the group of juvenile offenders that are at the highest risk for reoffending: serious offenders. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to conduct secondary data analysis on data from the Pathways to Desistance Study (Mulvey et al., 2004) to enhance understanding of how continuous trauma exposure and related symptoms impact reoffending in serious juvenile offenders. This study utilized secondary data analysis on six annual waves of data from the Pathways to Desistance study (Mulvey et al., 2004), a large multi-site, longitudinal study of adolescents who had committed a serious criminal offense. The study followed juvenile offenders into adulthood. The current study analyzed youth self-report of demographic variables, community violence exposure, trauma-related symptoms, and violent offending, as well as official records of youth offending. Regression analysis, latent transition analysis, and survival analysis were used to examine the research questions and hypotheses. Results showed that the majority of participants experienced continuous violence exposure as witnesses to community violence, with lower rates for victimization. Further, violence exposure and trauma-related symptoms (anxiety and hostility) co-occurred over time. Also, continuous violence exposure during adolescence predicted self-reported violent reoffending in early adulthood, even after controlling for demographic factors. Victimization significantly increased the risk for re-arrest. Further, this risk of re-offending was higher for male offenders than for female offenders. Finally, callous-unemotional traits and hostility mediated the relationship between continuous violence exposure and later violent offending. In this study, data from the Pathways to Desistance study were analyzed using SPSS and Mplus software packages, and the syntax files used to analyze the data have been included. The Pathways to Desistance study datasets are archived at the University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and the PI obtained the Pathways data from ICPSR.

The Survey of Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) is the only national survey that gathers data directly from youth in the juvenile justice system. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) designed the survey in 2000 and 2001 to survey offender youth between the ages of 10 and 20. SYRP asks the youth about their backgrounds, offense histories and problems; the facility environment; experiences in the facility; experiences with alcohol and drugs; experiences of victimization in placement; medical needs and services received; and their expectations for the future. SYRP research provides answers to a number of questions about the characteristics and experiences of youth in custody including: Who are the youth in placement? What are their offenses? What are their family backgrounds? What are their expectations for the future? How are youth grouped in living units and programs? What activities are available in each facility? How accessible are social, emotional, and legal supports? What is the quality of the youth-staff relationships? How clear are the facility's rules? How clear is the facility's commitment to justice and due process? What methods of control and discipline do staff use? SYRP's findings are based on anonymous interviews with a nationally representative sample of youth in custody during the spring of 2003 using audio computer-assisted self-interview (ACASI) technology. SYRP is the latest addition to two ongoing data collections that OJJDP designed and implemented in the 1990s. It joins the Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement and the Juvenile Residential Facility Census to provide updated statistics on youth in custody in the juvenile justice system. SYRP bulletins, reports, and a simplified online analysis tool are available from the SYRP Project Web site.

The primary research goal of this study was to explore the effects of juvenile incarceration on future recidivism using social and legal history data about adjudicated juvenile delinquents in New York City. The secondary research goal of this study was to explore family court decision-making and the nature of family court processing. Study subjects were chosen by examining Family Court calendars in all five New York City boroughs for each day in April, May, and June of 2000, which identified every youth who received a disposition during this period. Research staff located case files for each subject in probation department file rooms in the five family courts, using personal and numeric identifiers taken from court calendars. Using a standardized data collection instrument that was developed by the research team, coded information was derived for 698 total cases by examining documents in each subject's probation case file. Coded data from probation case files offered a baseline portrait of this sample of delinquent youth. In order to measure recidivism, the principal investigator linked baseline records, using personal and numeric identifiers, to arrest and incarceration information provided by other city and state agencies. In this dataset, each record is essentially a snapshot of a particular youth at the time of his or her disposition. Variables about the sampled youth include: demographic profile, case processing, legal history, characteristics of present and past family environments, school performance indicators, community and peer relationships, history of alcohol and drug use, mental health history, and history of victimization.

The overall goal of this study was to acquire a greater understanding of the development of adolescent antisocial behavior using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Longitudinal cohort data from PHDCN were analyzed to assess patterns of substance use and delinquency across three waves for three age cohorts and 78 neighborhoods. This analysis of existing PHDCN data used multiple cohort and multilevel latent growth models as well as several ancillary approaches to answer questions pertinent to the development of adolescent antisocial behavior.

This data collection focuses on status offenders--those juveniles who commit acts (such as running away, habitual truancy, and possession of alcohol) that are forbidden to minors but not to adults. The purpose of this study was to connect legislative intent, service delivery systems, and youth responses in order to provide guidelines for future status offender legislation and practice. In the selection of sampling sites, three categories of intervention philosophy were represented: (1) deterrence, which recommends sanctions and control through the juvenile justice system, (2) treatment, which recommends emotional adjustment strategies through the community mental health system, and (3) normalization, which recommends little or no professional response. Respondents from youth service agencies in seven cities in the United States were asked about service delivery system characteristics (such as types of referral sources, how often they were used, and length of client service period), organizational characteristics (such as public versus private auspices, sources of funding, and educational level of staff), and youth characteristics (such as family situation, school status, and educational attainment of principal adults in the home). Demographic variables for status offenders included gender, race, age, and type of residence. Interviews with youths were also conducted and included a self-concept scale, by which youths could categorize themselves as delinquent, disturbed, and/or conforming. The units of analysis for this study are the individual and the youth service agency.

This study contains data from the Northwestern Juvenile Project (NJP) series, a prospective longitudinal study of the mental health needs and outcomes of youth in detention. This study examined the following goals: (1) firearm involvement (access, ownership, and use) during adolescence and young adulthood; (2) perpetration of firearm violence over time; and (3) patterns of firearm victimization (injury and mortality) over time. This study addressed the association between early involvement with firearms and firearm-firearm perpetration and victimization in adulthood. The original sample included 1,829 randomly selected youth, 1,172 males and 657 females, then 10 to 18 years old, enrolled in the study as they entered the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center from 1995 to 1998. Among the sample were 1,005 African Americans, 524 Hispanics, and 296 non-Hispanic white respondents. Participants were tracked from the time they left detention. Re-interviews were conducted regardless of where respondents were living when their follow-up interview was due: in the community, correctional settings, or by telephone if they lived farther than two hours from Chicago.