Patterns in Juvenile Misbehavior

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.