Juvenile sex offenders represent a serious and violent group of delinquents. Despite the severity of their crimes, the literature focusing on risk factors that influence recidivism and the types of re-arrest after incarceration is lacking. This research study examined 499 determinately sentenced juvenile sex offenders that were released from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department. This sample was then followed for three years upon their release. This analysis revealed that 51.5 percent were re-arrested for any offense while 45.91 percent were re-arrested for a felony offense. This study identified a number of risk factors relative to JSO recidivism. These factors include having a history of emotional abuse, race being African American, being gang affiliated, having a larger number of previous adjudications, and having higher counts of institutional misconduct infractions. Those JSOs older at intake and release, and those who were incarcerated for longer periods of time were less likely to re-offend upon release. Lastly, this study ends with suggestions for future research as well as policy implications geared toward juvenile sex offenders.

Thesis. 1979. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaf 99. / M.C.P.

This thesis interrogates the emergence of a universal modern idea of childhood in the Madras Presidency between 1920 and 1942. It considers the construction and uses of ‘childhood’ as a conceptual category and the ways in which this informed intervention in the lives of children, particularly in the spheres of education and juvenile justice. Against a background of calls for national self-determination, the thesis considers elite debates about childhood as specifically ‘Indian’, examining the ways in which ‘the child’ emerged in late colonial South India as an object to be reformed and as a ‘human becoming’ or future citizen of an independent nation. Social reform in late colonial India is often assumed to be an area of conflict, particularly informed by racial difference. Children are seen as key targets in the competition between the colonial state and Indian politicians and professionals. However, a detailed study of the 1920 Madras Children Act and 1920 Elementary Education Act reveals the development of consensual decisions in regard to child welfare and the expansion of a ‘social’ realm, which existed outside the political. Dyarchy profoundly changed the nature of government and in policy areas related to children the ‘state’ was Indian in character, action and personnel. This thesis contends that the discursive emergence of ‘the child’ was complicated when legislation was implemented. By tracing implementation it demonstrates the extent to which modern childhood was a symbolic claim, rather than political commitment to children. Tracing the interactions between adults in authority - whether as parents, teachers, politicians or civil society activists – the thesis explores the extent to which the avowedly universal category of childhood was subsumed beneath other identities based on class, caste and gender. Understanding childhood through a variety of administration reports, political debates and pedagogical journals reflects the views and actions of adults. By utilising the remembered experience of middle-class children in autobiographies and the layered archival evidence of aristocratic children under the jurisdiction of the Court of Wards, the thesis balances adult discourses with an awareness of children as historical agents. It considers the ways in which children learned, played and interacted with each other. Finally, therefore, it charts the limits of adult authority and the ways differing identities were experienced in the lives of children in southern India in the early twentieth century.

Research on resilience has almost completely bypassed the juvenile justice literature. Using data on 1,354 youth from the Pathways to Desistance study, the present study examined associations between individual, community, and familial risk and promotive factors and resilient outcomes, specifically gainful activity, in juvenile offenders. Results of both logistic and hierarchical regression models indicated significant associations between resilient outcomes in each domain: specifically individual (age at first arrest, motivation to succeed), community (geographic location, exposure to violence), and family (socioeconomic status, parental monitoring) predictors. Finally, this paper discusses reasons for non-significant findings and directions for future research on resilience among youth involved in the juvenile justice system.

Thesis (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2005. / Theses (School of Criminology) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2003. / Advisor: Richard Tate, Florida State University, College of Education, Dept. of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Mar. 1, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

The school to prison pipeline is a phrase used to describe the phenomenon where youth, and disproportionately African American males, are pushed out of public school systems into criminal justice systems. It hints at the possibility that incarceration is not a matter of chance, but often a structurally created and supported outcome. In order to understand the men most disproportionately impacted by the phenomena this study explores the narratives of twelve formerly incarcerated African American men. Structural racism, challenges of school integrations and criminal justice policies emerge as powerful influences on the life outcomes of formerly incarcerated African American men. This study goes beyond statistical accounts of racial disproportionality in the criminal justice system to deeply consider the voices of generations of formerly incarcerated African American men. Understanding the impact of the school and justice systems on the lives of African American men has implications for educators and policy makers. / text

Drawing on field work at three different juvenile justice organizations, this dissertation explores the joint problems of interpretation and coordination in the face of problems marked by moral ambiguity and practical uncertainty. The author draws on array of research from a wide array of social and cognitive sciences to examine the relationship between knowledge and cognition, on the one hand, and coordination of action, on the other. Based on this work, the author proposes a more expansive, multidimensional model of cognition made up of four interconnected dimensions: conceptual, practical, emotional, and coordinating. This model allows us to better understand how people may coordinate their actions with others despite a lack of shared conceptual understanding of the problem at hand. The author then presents separate case studies of the three organizations, exploring these themes in further detail. In the case of the juvenile delinquent treatment center, Berkshire Farm Center and Services for Youth, the author examines how formal organizational processes and standards help coordinate the practices of the administration and clinical staff, on the one hand, and the teachers and child care workers, on the other, despite their fundamentally different understandings the boys’ problems and how to deal with them. In the second case, on the sentencing process at a State’s Department of Juvenile Justice, the author details how the formal, ritualized nature of the sentencing meetings allows for various professionals to express conflicting rationales for a given sentence simultaneously. In the third case, the author explores how the introduction of formalized practices, standards, and measures helps overcome the practical confusions, emotional conflicts, and differences in conceptual understanding between street workers and case managers that nearly derailed the efforts of the pilot gang intervention program, StreetSafe Boston. Taken together, these three case studies suggest that the strength of an organization’s formal bureaucratic features comes in part from the fact that they facilitate coordination without the need to resolve conflicts and contradictions in substantive interpretations, which may be a troubling but necessary accomplishment in the face of a problem rife with moral ambiguity and practical uncertainty. / Sociology

Rehabilitation Centres receive both children in need of protection and youths who have committed a criminal offence. In all cases, the Centre's mandate is to help them readjust to society. In pursuing this mandate, educators resort to measures of seclusion, time-out or withdrawal, whether for therapeutic or disciplinary reasons. All of these measures, however one wishes to call them, may be effected through confinement. The children are thus liable to be locked into their own room, into a specially designed time-out room or into a seclusion room, the time of confinement lasting anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours. Some rehabilitation programs, calling for measures such as time-out or withdrawal, currently allow for the possibility of confining a child in a locked room for some twenty hours a day, for several consecutive days. / From a legal standpoint, confinement may constitute a form of therapy, or it may constitute a disciplinary measure. Depending on the reason for its implementation, seclusion therefore falls under different legal provisions. Yet in all cases, seclusion remains a coercive measure with a strong punitive component. It would therefore be logical for all confinement measures to be governed by the same set of legal rules. Furthermore, the framework provided by health services legislation, which is based on consent to treatment, does not properly account for such measures. Regulating the disciplinary powers of educators, especially their power to lock up children in closed rooms, would be an approach better suited to the actual needs of children.

Thesis (LL. M.)--University of Canterbury, 2007. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 356-389). Also available via the World Wide Web.