By Andrea R. Coleman

This bulletin discusses common misconceptions surrounding expungement. It also provides information about the collateral consequences of juvenile records as well as federal, state, and local emerging practices. The key information and findings include the following: • Expungement, sealing, and confidentiality are three legally distinct methods for destroying or limiting access to juvenile records. However, these methods may permit police, courts, or the public access to juvenile records, depending on state laws. • The public and impacted youth often erroneously believe that once police and courts expunge juvenile records they no longer exist. The handling of expunged juvenile records varies widely from state to state. • Youth with juvenile records frequently experience collateral consequences of their arrest or adjudication, which may include difficulty accessing educational services, obtaining employment, serving in the military, and finding and maintaining housing. • States, localities, and the federal government have implemented promising practices to decrease collateral consequences, including “ban the box” legislation and expungement clinics (Avery and Hernandez, 2018; Radice, 2017; Shah, Fine, and Gullen, 2014; Shah and Strout, 2016).

Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, 2020. 12p.

By Amber Farn and Michael Umpierre

Authored in partnership with the Council of Juvenile Justice Administrators (CJJA) and with support from The Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew), this publication provides an overview of research related to length of stay and lessons learned from the Length of Stay Policy Academy hosted by CJJR and CJJA in 2020 with support from Pew. The report features length of stay efforts from the jurisdictions that participated in the Academy, including Bexar County, Texas; Idaho; Maryland; New York City, New York; and Oklahoma, as well as other states that have led related initiatives such as Arkansas, Illinois, and Utah. Policymakers.

Washington, DC: Center for Juvenile Justice Reform, McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University, 2023. 33p.

By HM Inspectorate of Probation (UK)

The use of out-of-court disposals (OOCDs) with young people who break the law is increasing. One OOCD is a community resolution (CR) which allows the police to deal with less serious offences in an informal way, providing a diversionary approach without formal court proceedings. This can allow young people to avoid having a criminal conviction on their record, give victims the opportunity to have their say, and provide a more efficient resolution than pursuing a criminal conviction. Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) perform a key role in the delivery of CRs, yet there remains a significant gap in knowledge about how CRs are delivered with young people. This bulletin focuses on findings from research which explored how youth offending services implement and deliver CRs in England and Wales, documenting working practices as well as key enablers and barriers to effective practice.

Research & Analysis Bulletin 2023/01 . Manchester: HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2023. 40p.

By Hazel Kemshall

HM Inspectorate of Probation is committed to reviewing, developing and promoting the evidence base for high-quality probation and youth offending services. Academic Insights are aimed at all those with an interest in the evidence base. We commission leading academics to present their views on specific topics, assisting with informed debate and aiding understanding of what helps and what hinders probation and youth offending services. This report was kindly produced by Professor Hazel Kemshall, summarising key learning for practitioners and organisations in relation to risk management. Practitioners are often required to make decisions in challenging situations with incomplete information, and it is thus important to pay attention to the potential influence of subjective biases and individual emotions and values. To minimise error and ensure that decisions are balanced, reasoned and well-evidenced, practitioners need to seek and critically appraise information, and adopt an open, honest and reflective approach….

Manchester: HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2021. 16p.

By W. Dyer Halpern

In 2018, New York State enacted its “Raise the Age” (RTA) legislation, which raised the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 years old. Under RTA, 16- and 17-year-olds accused of misdemeanors go to family court, where they can be adjudicated as juvenile delinquents. A 16- or 17-year-old accused of committing felonies is considered an “adolescent offender” (AO). When an AO is arrested for a felony-level crime, his case is initially heard in the “youth part” of the criminal/supreme/superior court system (what we’ll call “adult court” going forward). But most of these cases are quickly “removed”—that is, transferred—to family court or even directly to family court probation. Under RTA, in order for a prosecutor to keep an AO in adult court, he must prove by a preponderance of the evidence that: 1. the defendant caused significant physical injury to a person other than a participant in the offense; or 2. the defendant displayed a firearm, shotgun, rifle, or deadly weapon, as defined in the penal law in furtherance of such offense; or 3. the defendant unlawfully engaged in sexual intercourse, oral sexual conduct, anal sexual conduct, or sexual contact.1 But these factors are harder to satisfy than they might seem…..

New York: The Manhattan Institute, 2023. 23p.

By Judd B. Kessler. Sarah Tahamont. Alexander Gelber, Adam Isen

AbstractRecent policy discussions have proposed government-guaranteed jobs, including for youth. One key potential benefit of youth employment is a reduction in criminal justice contact. Prior work on summer youth employment programs has documented little-to-no effect of the program on crime during the program but has found decreases in violent and other serious crimes among “at-risk” youth in the year or two after the program.We add to this picture by studying randomized lotteries for access to the New YorkCity Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), the largest such program in theUnited States. We link SYEP data to New York State criminal records data to inves-tigate outcomes of 163,447 youth who participated in a SYEP lottery between 2005and 2008. We find evidence that SYEP participation decreases arrests and convictions during the program summer, effects that are driven by the small fraction (3 percent)of SYEP youth who are at-risk, as defined by having been arrested before the start of the program. We conclude that an important benefit of SYEPs is the contemporaneous effect during the program summer and that the effect is concentrated among individu-als with prior contact with the criminal justice system

Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Volume41, Issue3. Summer 2022. Pages 710-730

By The Youth Justice Legal Centre (YJLC)

Children need and must be entitled to specialist legal representation. This has long been obvious. This new research adds to a growing body of evidence but for the first time highlights the extent to which solicitors are themselves seeking to address this training need. However, without clear guidance they are falling short, and children are being failed. There is no requirement for solicitors representing children in the criminal justice system to have any specialist training before entering a youth court or representing children at a police station. It therefore falls to individual solicitors to identify their training needs. Children end up with worse outcomes than they should as a direct result of lawyers being unaware of guidance and special protections available to children. This is confirmed by the research findings. The situation would be significantly improved if solicitors who represent children undertook regular training on key youth justice topics. More children would be diverted away from formal criminal justice processes, they would be better supported through legal processes and the risk of reoffending reduced. Put simply, children must have better.

London: YJLC, 2023. 8p.

By Chris Trotter and Phillipa Evans

A number of studies have found that when probation officers, and others who supervise young people and adults on community based orders, have good intervention skills their clients are more likely to be engaged in supervision and to have low recidivism rates. The skills include, role clarification, pro-social modelling, problem solving, cognitive and relationship skills. Little research has been done, however, on the development of these skills across whole organisations. This study aimed to examine the extent to which training and coaching of probation officers, across two state youth justice departments in Australia, improved the use of workers’ skills. Audio-tapes of worker/client interviews were provided to research staff before and after training and coaching. Analysis of the audio-tapes found a significant increase in the overall use of worker skills following the training and coaching. However, the increases in the skills applied largely to role clarification, rather than pro-social modelling, problem solving and cognitive skills.

European Journal of Probation. Volume 15, Issue 2Aug 2023Pages97-170

By Lauren Knoth; Paige Wanner; Lijian He

This document reports on an outcome evaluation of the Washington State Aggression Replacement Training (WSART) program, conducted by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP), to evaluate recidivism outcomes for juvenile court youth. WSART is a group-based intervention for moderate- and high-risk youth with criminal charges filed in juvenile courts. The program uses cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) techniques to teach youth three core components: anger control, moral reasoning, and social skills. The authors evaluated the effects of WSART in Washington State courts from 2005 to 2016. They found that, on average, WSART participants were more likely to recidivate than similar youth who did not participate in the WSART program. The authors note that differences in recidivism for WSART versus non-WSART youth were evident in nearly all subpopulations of males, including White youth, Black youth, Hispanic youth, younger youth, high-risk youth, moderate-risk youth, youth assessed using the Back On Track risk (BOT) assessment, and youth assessed with the Positive Achievement Change Tool (PACT) assessment; however, results indicated that WSART participation did reduce recidivism for females. The authors also state that they found that youth who completed the entire WSART curriculum were significantly less likely to recidivate than youth who participated but did not complete the WSART program.

Olympia, WA: Washington State Institute for Public Policy, 2019. 70p.

By Christoph Engel

Objectives: Peer effects on the decision to commit a crime have often been documented. But how little does it take to trigger the effect? Method: A fully incentivized, anonymous experiment in the tradition of experimental law and economics provides fully internally valid causal evidence. A companion vignette study with members of the general public extends external validity. Results: (a) the more of their peers violate an arbitrary rule, the more participants do; (b) a minority has a threshold and switches from rule-abiding to violation once a sufficient number of their peers violate the rule; (c) the more the rule is constraining, the more participants are sensitive to the number of others who violate the rule; (d) if participants do not have explicit information about the incidence of rule violations in their community, they rely on their beliefs. Conclusion: In terms of substance, the paper shows that mere social information is the core of peer effects. In terms of methodology, the paper demonstrates the power of incentivized, decontextualized lab experiments for isolating mental building blocks of the decision to commit a crime.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 2023, Vol. 60(4) 455–492

By Katie Hunter

This thesis is concerned with the overrepresentation of black and minority ethnic (BME) children and looked after children, in the youth justice system in general and the secure state in particular, in England and Wales. In the period 1993 to 2008, youth justice was characterised by a process of extensive penal expansion. Since 2008, however, the child prison population has fallen dramatically. The decline has been linked to pragmatic cost reduction as well as an increase in diversionary measures which keep children out of the system altogether. However, BME children and looked after children have not benefited from this decline to the same extent as white children and non-looked after children. The contraction in the system has served to intensify existing inequalities. This thesis interrogates the nature and extent of the overrepresentation of these groups. It employs a mixed-methods approach which involves analyses of secondary data and in-depth interviews with 27 national youth justice and children’s services professionals. This thesis builds upon and extends previous research, it determines that BME children are criminalised through ‘institutional racialisation’ which operates on micro, meso and macro levels. The thesis signals policing as having a particularly powerful influence on the levels of BME children in the system. The weight of these findings lie precisely in the fact that they are so longstanding. …

Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 2019. 307p.

By Tim Bateman, Anne-Marie Day and John Pitts

Although there are some important limitations with the data, the available evidence demonstrates conclusively that children who are in the care of the local authority are consistently over-represented among those who come to the attention of the youth justice system. A similar disproportionality is also evident within the children’s custodial estate. While it appears that the relationship is long-standing, it has only recently become the focus of policy attention which has begun to explore some of the reasons for the patterns discernible in the figures (see, for example, Schofield et al, 2012: Laming, 2016). In particular, an independent review of the relationship between the care system and the criminal justice system, led by Lord Laming, commissioned an extensive exploration of the available literature that provides a useful baseline for future research (Staines, 2016). The current review aims to provide a context for research, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, that aims to identity the particular pathways of looked after children into, through and leaving custody and to establish in what ways, and to what extent, these might differ from those of children who do not have care experience. It does not accordingly aim to replicate the earlier work identified in the previous paragraph; instead the intention is to draw on previous reviews, and relevant additional material, through a lens that focuses on the existing evidence base as it relates specifically to the likelihood of children being incarcerated, to their subsequent custodial experience and to the provision of effective resettlement once they have been released.

Luton: University of Bedfordshire, 2018. 37p.

By Zhen Zeng, E. Ann Carson, and Rich Kluckow

Juveniles (persons age 17 or younger) arrested or convicted for a criminal offense may be housed in juvenile residential facilities or in adult jails and prisons, depending on state statute, judicial discretion, and federal law. This report details trends for juveniles who are held in adult facilities. Key Findings ƒ The number of juveniles incarcerated in all U.S. adult prisons or jails declined from a peak of 10,420 in 2008 to a low of 2,250 in 2021. In 2021, local jails had custody of 1,960 juveniles while state and federal adult prisons held 290. The percent of the total jail population who were juveniles declined from 0.9% in 2002 to 0.3% in 2021. The percent of the total prison population who were juveniles declined from 0.2% in 2002 to 0.02% in 2021. In 2021, 87% of juveniles in adult correctional facilities were held in local jails and 13% were held in prisons, compared to 66% in local jails and 34% in prisons in 2002, the earliest year for which comparable data are available for both populations

Just the Stats Series. Washington DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice 2023. 5p.

By Carlene Firmin, Hannah King, Molly Manister and Vanessa Bradbury

Contextual Safeguarding (CS) has developed as a safeguarding approach for practitioners to recognise contextual dynamics and children’s exposure to extra-familial harm (EFH). Within CS, practitioners (and the systems in which they work) assess neighbourhood, schools or peer groups to understand the contextual factors that are contributing to the harm and abuse of the young people who are associated with it. Interventions are then developed within the contexts where that harm has occurred, through relationships building, advocacy, training, policy and practical action, alongside support to the affected young people. Initially focused on and piloted within children’s social care, the approach has generated much interest from youth justice services (YJSs) across the country. It is evident that EFH crosses into YJS boundaries and collaborative work through the CS approach that is already underway within some local service areas across England. Safeguarding responsibilities are currently overseen by multi-agency Safeguarding Partnerships made up of three statutory partners – police, health and local authorities. These partners are free to arrange their local provision and to involve other agencies as they see fit. Probation and YJSs are frequently invited to attend and have a duty to cooperate.

Research & Analysis Bulletin 2023/02 . Manchester, UK: HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2023. 44p.

By the National Center for Juvenile Justice

The National Center for Juvenile Justice has released "Juvenile Court Statistics 2020." This report describes delinquency and status offense cases handled between 2005 and 2020 by U.S. courts with jurisdiction over juvenile populations. National estimates are presented on 508,400 delinquency cases and 57,700 petitioned status offense cases handled in 2020. The report also tracks caseload trends from 2005 to 2020. Data include case counts and rates, juvenile demographics, and offenses charged. This report draws on data from the National Juvenile Court Data Archive, funded by the National Institute of Justice with support from OJJDP.

Pittsburgh, PA: National Center for Juvenile Justice, 2023. 114p.

By Richard Mendel

As The Sentencing Project documented in Why Youth Incarceration Fails: An Updated Review of the Evidence, compelling research proves that incarceration is not necessary or effective in the vast majority of delinquency cases. Rather, incarceration most often increases young people’s likelihood of returning to the justice system. Incarceration also damages young people’s future success in education and employment. Further, it exposes young people, many of whom are already traumatized, to abuse, and it contradicts the clear lessons of adolescent development research. These harms of incarceration are inflicted disproportionately on Black youth and other youth of color. Reversing America’s continuing overreliance on incarceration will require two sets of complementary reforms. First, it will require far greater use of effective alternative-to-incarceration programs for youth who have committed serious offenses and might otherwise face incarceration. Second, it will require extensive reforms to state and local youth justice systems, most of which continue to employ problematic policies and practices that can undermine the success of alternative programs and often lead to incarceration of youth who pose minimal risk to public safety. This report addresses the first challenge: What kinds of interventions can youth justice systems offer in lieu of incarceration for youth who pose a significant risk to public safety?1 Specifically, it identifies six program models that consistently produce better results than incarceration, and it details the essential characteristics required for any alternative-to-incarceration program – including homegrown programs developed by local justice system leaders and community partners – to reduce young people’s likelihood of reoffending and steer them to success.

Washington, DC: The Sentencing Project, 2023. 33p.

Byt Andrew Whittaker , James Densley and  Karin S. Moser 

Social media provide novel opportunities for street gangs to operate beyond their traditional borders to sell drugs, recruit members and control their territory, virtually and physically. Although social media have contributed to the means available to street gangs today, it does not mean that every gang agrees on their use. Drawing on different perspectives (ex-gang members, law enforcement) on gangs using a multi-method design in a London borough, the current study shows that social media have polarized gangs, resulting in two distinct types of digital adaptation. The proposed division of ‘digitalist’ and ‘traditionalist’ gangs is rooted in Thrasher’s (1927) dictum that no two gangs are alike and explains how some gangs prefer to keep a low profile, thus, avoiding social media use. ‘Digitalists’, by contrast, prefer to use social media as a way to gain reputation and territorial expansion. They use it to brand themselves and to appear attractive for recruits and customers alike. These differences can be theoretically explained firstly as a generational gap, meaning that younger gang members prefer the use of social media; and secondly, by how well established a gang already is, as newer gangs need more attention to establish themselves.
 Computers in Human Behavior Volume 110, September 2020, 106403

By Christian Dustmann, Mikkel Mertz and Anna Okatenko 

The effects of neighbourhood characteristics on the development of children and adolescents is a key area of research in the social sciences literature. Early papers such as Brooks-Gunn et al. (1993) document strong associations between children’s outcomes and the characteristics of the neighbourhoods they live in. More recent work finds evidence that the neighbourhood children grow up in a↵ects their earnings, college attendance, marriage, fertility (Chetty et al., 2016; Chetty and Hendren, 2018a,b; Chyn, 2018; Deutscher, 2020), and school performance (˚Aslund et al., 2011; Galster et al., 2016). One particular concern is the e↵ect of neighbourhood characteristics on adolescents’ criminal, delinquent, and health-compromising activities (for a review, see Leventhal and Brooks-Gunn (2000)), in particular the potential negative impacts of gangs, drugs and violence on children and young teenagers (Jencks and Mayer, 1990; Popkin et al., 2002). A small literature investigates the impact of exposure to crime on the criminal behaviour of young men and women, but little is known about which type of criminal activity in the neighbourhood may lead to spillovers, how this compares with the impact other neighbourhood characteristics have on later outcomes, how exposure to crime affects other dimensions of risky behaviour in particular for girls, and what the longer-term economic consequences of exposure to crime for males and females are….

Bonn: IZA  Institute of Labor Economics .2023. 76p.

By  Anne-Marie Day, Tim Bateman and John Pitts

  It is well documented that children in care – those looked-after by the local authority – are over-represented in the youth justice system.1 In recent years, the relationship between care and crime has begun to receive increasing academic and policy attention, culminating, in 2018, in the government publishing a national protocol to reduce unnecessary criminalisation of children in care and improve the criminal justice responses when they do enter the youth justice system. The use of child imprisonment has fallen dramatically over the past decade, but the experiences of children confined in the secure estate has worsened, leading to widespread acknowledgement that the incarceration of children is damaging and counterproductive and that existing provision is not fit for purpose. Looked-after children who come into contact with the justice system are seven times more likely to be detained than their non-care equivalents, but little is known about the factors leading to such over-representation or the differential experiences of children in care while in detention. This report bridges that evidence gap by considering the relationship between care and imprisonment. The research on which it draws, across the nine local authorities in the South and West Yorkshire Resettlement Consortium (SWYC) area, explored the pathways of looked-after children into, through and out of the custodial estate. A comparative approach allowed the identification of the extent to which those pathways differ for children in care and those who are not.

Bedminster, UK: University of Bedminster, 2020. 79p.

By Jean Marie McGloin and Kyle J. Thomas 

Peer influence occupies an intriguing place in criminology. On the one hand, there is a long line of theorizing and empirical work highlighting it as a key causal process for delinquency. On the other, there is a group of theoretical skeptics who view it as one of the most notorious examples of a spurious link. After discussing these perspectives, this review takes stock of our intellectual advancements in understanding peer influence over decades’ worth of research toward this endeavor. We conclude that although there have been important gains, essential questions and gaps remain. Toward this aim, we offer some lines of future work that we believe offer pathways to yielding the greatest added value to the discipline. 

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2019. 2:241–64