School-Based Juvenile Boot Camps: Evaluating Specialized Treatment and Rehabilitation (STAR)

Implemented in Montgomery County, Texas, STAR deviates from traditional boot camps in a variety of ways. The program is closely coupled with school jurisdictions, the juvenile court, and correctional authorities. In addition, the program is non-residential and serves status, misdemeanor, and felony juvenile offenders and mandates parental participation. STAR was initiated to address several goals: enable individuals to remain in school while reducing their disruptive behavior, use school expulsion as a last resort, improve the academic performance of participants, coordinate a joint effort between juvenile authorities and school jurisdictions, instill a sense of pride and discipline in participants, and reduce the number of criminal referrals to juvenile authorities. The program was evaluated by comparing recidivist outcomes of participants with a group of intensive supervision probationers (ISP) in Conroe, Texas. At 12 months after concluding the program, 53 percent of STAR participants were rearrested compared to 36 percent of ISP participants. Additionally, STAR participants were rearrested 41 days sooner than ISP participants and were significantly more serious in their post-release offending. Implications and considerations for future research on juvenile boot camps are discussed. An appendix contains an offense seriousness scale for bivariate comparisons

Applied research methods in criminal justice and criminology/ Fristsch

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Applied research methods in criminal justice and criminology

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Adverse Childhood Experiences, Commitment Offense, and Race/Ethnicity: Are the Effects Crime-, Race-, and Ethnicity-Specific?

Adverse childhood experiences are associated with an array of health, psychiatric, and behavioral problems including antisocial behavior. Criminologists have recently utilized adverse childhood experiences as an organizing research framework and shown that adverse childhood experiences are associated with delinquency, violence, and more chronic/severe criminal careers. However, much less is known about adverse childhood experiences vis-à-vis specific forms of crime and whether the effects vary across race and ethnicity. Using a sample of 2520 male confined juvenile delinquents, the current study used epidemiological tables of odds (both unadjusted and adjusted for onset, total adjudications, and total out of home placements) to evaluate the significance of the number of adverse childhood experiences on commitment for homicide, sexual assault, and serious persons/property offending. The effects of adverse childhood experiences vary considerably across racial and ethnic groups and across offense types. Adverse childhood experiences are strongly and positively associated with sexual offending, but negatively associated with homicide and serious person/property offending. Differential effects of adverse childhood experiences were also seen among African Americans, Hispanics, and whites. Suggestions for future research to clarify the mechanisms by which adverse childhood experiences manifest in specific forms of criminal behavior are offered

Adverse Childhood Experiences and Forensic Typologies: Getting Specific about Trauma among Institutionalized Youth

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are linked to various conduct and behavior problems within juvenile delinquents, but fewer studies focused on these associations among specific forensic typologies of offending. Utilizing data from 3382 institutionalized delinquents in Texas, logistic regression models indicated multiple associations between ACEs and forensic typologies in both adjusted and unadjusted models, with sexual abuse and physical abuse emerging as the most consistent and robust predictors. Supplemental sensitivity models confirmed the associations between sexual abuse and physical abuse among youth who fit multiple forensic typologies. Models fared poorly at identifying youth who are engaged in fire setting. Implications for total and singular ACEs are discussed, along with how those relate to more clinically meaningful, forensic forms of juvenile delinquency

Adverse Childhood Experiences, Commitment Offense, and Race/Ethnicity: Are the Effects Crime-, Race-, and Ethnicity-Specific?

This article uses epidemiological tables of odds (both unadjusted and adjusted for onset, total adjudications, and total out of home placements) on a sample of 2520 male confined juvenile delinquents, to evaluate the significance of the number of adverse childhood experiences on commitment for homicide, sexual assault, and serious persons/property offending