Long-Term Criminal Trajectories of Youth Sanctioned in Adult Courts

The goal of the BJS Visiting Fellow program is to facilitate collaboration between academic scholars and government researchers in survey methodology, statistics, economics, and social sciences. BJS visiting fellows have the unique opportunity to address some substantive, methodological, and analytic issues relevant to BJS programs, and to further knowledge and understanding of criminal justice system operations.

BJS Visiting Fellows conduct research at BJS or at their home site, use BJS data and facilities, and interact with BJS staff.

This award specifically will focus on The Adult Trajectories of Juvenile Offenders data set collected by BJS on three cohorts of 16 and 17-year-olds processed in New York State's adult courts. The primary goal of the proposed research is to develop a firm understanding of the nature of adult court interventions on youthful offenders and the long-term impact such interventions have on later patterns of recidivism and residual lengths of criminal careers. Within this broad goal, the objective is more specifically to use this unique data set to its maximum capacity to answer a variety of interesting research questions that will be substantively important for national justice policy and to further knowledge on the application and relevance of various statistical techniques in modeling long-term criminal trajectories.

During the award period the applicant will work collaboratively with BJS staff to address the following set of preliminary research questions:

1. What is the overall pattern of criminal court sentencing of 16- and 17-year-old offenders and what are the key sources of heterogeneity in sentence severity?

2. What are the short and long-term criminal trajectories of youth receiving substantial adult court interventions and what are the sources of heterogeneity in future offending outcomes?

3. How do patterns of desistence and the identification of the type of individual that desists from crime differ across analytical models?

4. What, if any, differences exist across cohorts in initial sentence severity and long-term offending trajectories?

5. How does the landscape of youthful offending differ based upon state-specific or national models?

CA/NCF