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First published online January 28, 2011

The Road to Murder: The Enduring Criminogenic Effects of Juvenile Confinement Among a Sample of Adult Career Criminals

Matt DeLisi, Andy Hochstetler, Gloria Jones- Johnson, Jonathan W. Caudill, and James W. MarquartView all authors and affiliations
Volume 9, Issue 3
https://doi.org/10.1177/1541204010396107

Abstract

In the juvenile justice literature, deep-end interventions such as commitment to a confinement facility are reserved for the most severe delinquents but unfortunately have been shown to have negative consequences. The current study repurposes juvenile confinement within a criminal career context to empirically examine its role in homicide offending based on data from a sample of 445 male, adult habitual criminals. Poisson regression models indicated that juvenile confinement— measured both dimensionally and categorically—predicted murder arrests despite controls for juvenile homicide offending, juvenile violent delinquency, juvenile felony adjudications, juvenile non-compliance violations, juvenile arrest charges, onset, age, three racial/ethnic classifications, career arrests, career violent index arrests, and career property index arrests. Receiver operating characteristics—area under the curve (ROC-AUC) graphs showed that juvenile confinement predicted murder significantly but modestly better than chance although career violent offending was the strongest predictor of murder perpetration.

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Published In

Volume 9, Issue 3
Pages: 207 - 221
Article first published online: January 28, 2011
Issue published: July 2011

Keywords

  1. juvenile confinement
  2. murder
  3. homicide offending
  4. delinquent careers
  5. criminal careers

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Matt DeLisi
Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA, [email protected]
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Andy Hochstetler
Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
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Gloria Jones- Johnson
Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA
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Jonathan W. Caudill
California State University, Chico, CA, USA
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James W. Marquart
The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA
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