Improving juvenile court decision making requires information about how serious adolescent offenders desist from antisocial activity. A systematic research agenda on this topic requires consideration of several processes, including normative development in late adolescence, what constitutes desistance, and the factors likely to promote the end of involvement in antisocial behavior and successful adjustment in early adulthood. This article presents an overview of the major points to consider in pursuing this research agenda. Keywordsdesistance from crime; juvenile delinquency careers; stopping antisocial behaviorWe have always expected a great deal from the juvenile justice system. On one hand, the system is charged with keeping communities safe, using theories and approaches-such as deterrence or incapacitation-that are common to the criminal justice system. In recent years, juvenile courts have the added responsibility to ensure that its responses are proportional, making sure NIH Public Access

Implementing a large, longitudinal study of any sample is a major undertaking. The challenges are compounded when the study involves multiple sites and a high-risk sample. This article outlines the methodology for the Pathways to Desistance study, a multisite, longitudinal study of serious juvenile offenders, and discusses the key operational decisions with the greatest impact on the study design.Keywords juvenile delinquents; juvenile offenders; multisite study; participant retention; operational issues; participant recruitment; longitudinal studies; data collection; tracking participants; Pathways to Desistance; methods Over the past 2 decades, a great deal has been learned about the risk indicators associated with adolescent antisocial behavior and delinquency. Indeed, much has been clarified about how delinquent behavior starts, the general trajectory of this behavior during adolescence, and the relative predictive power of certain risk indicators (see, for example, Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986;Cicchetti & Cohen, 1995;Farrington, 1997;LeBlanc & Loeber, 1998;Loeber, Farrington, Stouthamer-Loeber, Moffitt, & Caspi, 2001;Moffitt, 1993;Sampson & Laub, 1990, 1997. One particularly important finding to emerge from this literature is that relatively few adolescent offenders go on to serious adult offending (Loeber & Farrington, 2000;Moffitt, 1993). Consequently, one of the most pressing current challenges for the field is to reliably NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptYouth Violence Juv Justice. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 January 29. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript distinguish between juvenile offenders who will continue problem behavior beyond adolescence and those who will not.Successfully meeting this challenge requires a greater empirical understanding about how and why juveniles desist from committing crime. Several calls have been made for researchers to study desistance from criminal activity with the same vigor exerted toward issues surrounding the onset of criminal activity (e.g., Farrington, 1997), yet the literature in this domain remains scant. One comprehensive approach to understanding this process would be to examine desistance from criminal activity prospectively, using multiple sources of information beyond official reporting (Farrington, 1997). This approach would be guided by the literature on child and adolescent development, and sensitive to the potential implications of findings for designing interventions and developing rational justice policies.The Pathways to Desistance Project highlighted in this special edition is an attempt to take up this challenge. It is a large-scale, two-site longitudinal examination of desistance from crime among adolescent serious offenders. The goal of the current study was to elucidate how developmental processes, social context, and intervention and sanctioning experiences affect the process of desistance from crime. The current study employed a prospective design with a broad measurement...

We present a new approach to regulating traffic related pollution in urban environments by utilising hybrid vehicles. We give a number of different strategies and some variants of how to achieve this. The efficacy of our approach is exemplified both by the construction of a proof of concept vehicle and by extensive simulations.