A central question for policymakers and professionals
Photo by Susan Madden Lankford
in the juvenile justice system—and for society as a whole—is what makes a young person step away from past offending and opt for another path in life? Is it the threat of sanctions, treatment of substance abuse or mental health issues, or is it a slicing away from antisocial peers? Is it a warm and supporting parent or adult or increasing maturity? Is it the treatment the youth receives while in the juvenile justice system?
This brief reports on four key findings:
• The majority of young, serious offenders do not make a career of crime, and the original crime is not a good predictor of future patterns of offending;
• Substance abuse treatment plays an important role in desistance;
• Many juvenile offenders are placed in the most restrictive (and expensive) setting—institutional care—even though it has little effect on subsequent re-arrest;
• The threat of arrest is a deterrent for the most serious adolescent offenders.
The prevalence and severity of crime drop off over time, and the original crime is not a good predictor of future patterns of offending. Most current law and policy assume that in the case of juvenile crime, the worst offenders are likely on a path to continued crime. Yet both in number of arrests (based on FBI data) and self-reported antisocial activities, ranging from very serious acts such as murder to less serious property crime, a majority of serious offenders are loosening their ties to criminal careers over time.
This brief reports the findings from both self-reported antisocial activity and official re-arrest reports because these two lenses offer a fuller picture of criminal activity over time.
The good news is that even after accounting for time incarcerated, the general trend is one of declining antisocial activities over time. Not all the offenders follow the same path, however. There are five identifiable subgroups in the sample, based on a composite score of the youths’ self-reported offenses at various time points over seven years.
Among this group of serious offenders, only about 10% report continued high levels of antisocial acts. About one in five shift from high levels of offending at the outset to very low levels of offending over the intervening years. Slightly more than one-half start off committing relatively fewer offenses and change little over time. In contrast, 12% start off committing relatively few offenses but increase their antisocial activities slightly over time.
The overall trend of loosening ties to crime over time holds when examining official records of re-arrest. Although a majority of the adolescents were re-arrested over the seven-year period, the prevalence and rate of arrest as well as the severity of the charges decreased over time. In about four in ten re-arrests, the most serious charge was a misdemeanor. Although it is difficult to determine an individual’s future on the basis of the initial crime, other factors do shed light on offending, including substance use.
Youth who become involved in the juvenile justice system often share some common risk factors, including mental health problems, developmental immaturity (a lack of self-control, for example), antisocial peers, harsh or lax parenting and growing up in neighborhoods characterized by poverty, crime and social disorder. Substance abuse, however, stands out among the risk factors.
Substance use problems exert a strong influence on continued offending. The study finds that youth with a substance use disorder were more likely to continue offending over the seven years and less likely to spend time working or in school than those with no substance use issues. In addition, having a substance use disorder magnified the impact of other risk factors related to continued offending. Having a substance use disorder made things significantly worse. Level of substance use also contributes to offending in this group. Heavier users are more likely to be arrested than are less frequent users, and this pattern does not change over time. So greater substance use goes hand in hand with increased offending at each time point.
There is also some encouraging news. Treating substance use disorder, albeit difficult, can help reduce later re-offending among serious juvenile offenders. However, interventions that curbed re-offending were those that involved family members in the treatment process and that lasted more than three months. Unfortunately, only one-fourth of treatments included family members.
The study reveals that there is no clear advantage of institutional care over other types of intervention and rehabilitation. Institutional placement seems to have no effect—positive or negative— on the subsequent rate of rearrest, and longer lengths of stay (exceeding three to six months) in a juvenile facility do not appear to reduce the rate of re-arrest. The rate of re-arrest after a stay in an institution is the same for stays between three and twelve months in length. If longer stays in institutional facilities are not reducing future offending, then it seems questionable whether this use of resources is either justified or politically attractive as a means of achieving public safety benefits.
It is also important to consider what services the youth are provided during their time in the facility and how well the services provided match their needs. Currently, services are not well matched to identified need. Depending on the setting, nearly two-thirds of youth with a mood or anxiety disorder, for example, did not report receiving mental health services. Likewise, more than half of youth with substance use disorders did not report getting drug or alcohol treatment.
Improved screening could help target services to need. In general, state-run facilities do a better job in matching services to particular needs. Youth in state-run facilities with an identified substance use problem were five times more likely to report receiving substance use treatment than those without a substance problem. Likewise, those with a mental health problem were four times more likely to report receiving mental health treatment than those without a mental health problem. In contrast, in private-sector contracted residential settings there were no differences in service receipt between those with and without substance use or mental health problems. In these settings, the tendency was to provide a similar package of services to everyone.
In a study of youth perceptions of their experiences in institutional settings, those who reported the settings as well-structured, with clear rules and routines, with limited exposure to antisocial peers and a generally more positive atmosphere reported less antisocial activity in the year after discharge. Youth making the transition from residential placement back to the community need a variety of supportive services, and community-based aftercare programs are becoming more widely available for these youth. Early evidence from this study shows that more planning for these aftercare services and contact with aftercare services before release from an institutional setting significantly reduce the odds of re-arrest or return to an institutional setting.
However, more needs to be done in connecting these adolescents with community services. During the seven years of the study, only 43% of youth participated in a range of community-based services, and they did so very infrequently. These results suggest that both more community-based care and improved institutional care could help reduce the chance of re-arrest.
This study finds that among serious offenders the certainty of arrest is a greater deterrent than the severity of punishment. While it is important that adolescents believe that if they do something wrong they’ll be arrested, the findings suggest that bringing the full force of the justice system to bear on them is not cost-effective. More targeted enforcement for those offenders who are unsure about their chances of getting caught will reduce the chances of re-arrest the most.
