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The Clemson Juvenile Delinquency Project: Major Findings from a Multi-Agency Study

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Abstract

Clemson University researchers have conducted a multi-agency, multi-cohort study on juvenile offending and recidivism. Important features of the study are a sample size of approximately 100,000 delinquents and 100,000 non-delinquents; the merging of data sets from a state department of juvenile justice with those of departments of mental health, social services, education, and (adult) law enforcement; and statistical analyses focusing on the role of age, race, gender, child maltreatment, mental health disorders and school-related disabilities on juvenile referrals, prosecutions, re-offending and incarceration. Published findings strongly support earlier empirical and clinical work on influences on juvenile delinquency. The present article emphasizes our findings related to five important issues: the impact of prosecution on repeat offending, the effects of the juvenile's race on solicitor recommendations, the significance of one-time juvenile offending, the empirical support for the concept of "resilience," and the magnitude of associations between childhood history and later criminal offending.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, Clemson University, Clemson, SC, 29634, USA

    David E. Barrett & Antonis Katsiyannis

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  1. David E. Barrett
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  2. Antonis Katsiyannis
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Correspondence to David E. Barrett.

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Compliance with Ethical Standards

The project has been conducted in compliance with ethical standards regarding the use of secondary data.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This report was based on analyses of data on human participants; the report was based on analyses of extant (secondary) data and thus did not require the informed consent of individual participants.

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Barrett, D.E., Katsiyannis, A. The Clemson Juvenile Delinquency Project: Major Findings from a Multi-Agency Study. J Child Fam Stud 26, 2050–2058 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0714-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0714-8

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