Patterns in Juvenile Misbehavior
- 1 April 1984
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Crime & Delinquency
- Vol. 30 (2), 293-308
- https://doi.org/10.1177/0011128784030002007
Abstract
The juvenile and criminal justice systems respond to youthful misbehavior as the onset of continued delinquency and increasing risk to society. Support for this assumption is far from clear. Existing career research fails to adequately consider the patterns and persistance of juvenile activity. The present study develops police contact histories for three birth cohorts of individuals. The analysis reveals that most careers concentrate in status and victimless offenses and roughly two-thirds of all juveniles desist before a fourth offense. The present results closely resemble many of Wolfgang et al.'s (1972) findings and some of the same conclusions are reached in the two studies.Keywords
This publication has 9 references indexed in Scilit:
- Delinquent Careers A Test of the Career Escalation ModelCriminology, 1982
- The Dynamics of Specialization in Juvenile OffensesSocial Forces, 1980
- Delinquency Involvement: An Evaluation of the Non-Intervention StrategyCriminal Justice Review, 1978
- Are Status Offenders Really So Different?Crime & Delinquency, 1976
- Honor, Normative Ambiguity and Gang ViolenceAmerican Sociological Review, 1974
- Age and a group test battery as predictors of types of crimeJournal of Clinical Psychology, 1972
- Scaling Juvenile DelinquencyJournal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 1968
- The Negro Numbers Man as a Criminal Type: The Construction and Application of a TypologyThe Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 1963
- The Professional ThiefHarvard Law Review, 1938