The Road to Murder: The Enduring Criminogenic Effects of Juvenile Confinement Among a Sample of Adult Career Criminals

Abstract

In the juvenile justice literature, deep-end interventions such as commitment to a confinement facility are reserved for the most severe delinquents but unfortunately have been shown to have negative consequences. The current study repurposes juvenile confinement within a criminal career context to empirically examine its role in homicide offending based on data from a sample of 445 male, adult habitual criminals. Poisson regression models indicated that juvenile confinementmeasured both dimensionally and categorically-predicted murder arrests despite controls for juvenile homicide offending, juvenile violent delinquency, juvenile felony adjudications, juvenile noncompliance violations, juvenile arrest charges, onset, age, three racial/ethnic classifications, career arrests, career violent index arrests, and career property index arrests. Receiver operating characteristics-area under the curve (ROC-AUC) graphs showed that juvenile confinement predicted murder significantly but modestly better than chance although career violent offending was the strongest predictor of murder perpetration.

Prospective Prediction of Juvenile Homicide/Attempted Homicide among Early-Onset Juvenile Offenders

“…Examining 1354 serious adolescent offenders from the Pathways to Desistance Study, prior work has demonstrated that only lower IQ and exposure to violence predict having been charged with homicide [25]. Examining retrospective criminal histories of adult male habitual criminals, DeLisi and colleagues demonstrated that juvenile confinement predicted subsequent murder arrests, even upon control of a host of other official criminal offending measures, age of onset, and race/ethnicity [26]. …”

Aggressive delinquency among north American indigenous adolescents: Trajectories and predictors

“…In 2010, over 40% of youth in custody were there for violent offenses (Sedlak & Bruce, 2010). Involvement in the justice system can have cascading effects on later well-being, including impaired educational attainment (Sweeten, 2006) and violent offending (DeLisi, Hochstetler, Johnson, Caudill, & Marquart, 2011). Furthermore, there is considerable continuity of aggressive behavior from childhood and adolescence through adulthood (Loeber, Farrington, & Waschbusch, 1998).…”

A Prospective Study of Offending Patterns of Youth Homicide Offenders Into Adulthood

“…However, using the same data, Farrington, Loeber, and Berg (2012) found that homicide offenders were less likely to be chronic offenders relative to other offenders. Using retrospective data on 455 habitual adult male offenders, DeLisi, Hochstetler, Jones-Johnson, Caudill, and Marquart (2011) observed that chronic offending, measured by arrests, was not associated with prior homicide offending. Similarly, in their study of the population of YHOs in England and Wales, Rodway et al (2011) found that only 52% of YHOs were previously convicted.…”