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NATIONAL CENTER FOR JUVENILE JUSTICE

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Criminological Highlights: Children and Youth

We gratefully acknowledge the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General for funding this project.

Volume 3, Number 3

January 2016

This issue of Criminological Highlights: Children and Youth addresses the following questions:

1. What types of restorative justice programs have been shown to be effective in reducing re-offending?

2. How can criminal justice policies increase the likelihood that youths commit property crimes?

3. How are the negative effects of child abuse affected by the neighbourhood in which the child lives?

4. Why would legally excluding someone from entering a McDonald's franchise trigger that person's exclusion from a nearby mortuary?

5. Do those who favour harsh penalties for offenders also believe that poor people in our communities are largely responsible for their condition?

6. Does an arrest without a charge hurt a person's life chances?

Criminological Highlights is designed to provide an accessible look at some of the more interesting criminological research that is currently being published. These summaries of high quality, policy related, published research are produced by the Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies at the University of Toronto. The Children and Youth edition constitutes a selection of these summaries (from the full edition) chosen by researchers at the National Center for Juvenile Justice and the University of Toronto. It is designed for those people especially interested in matters related to children and youth. Some of the articles may relate primarily to broad criminal justice issues but have been chosen because we felt they also have relevance for those interested primarily in matters related to children and youth. Each issue of the Children and Youth edition contains "Headlines and Conclusions" for each of 6 articles, followed by one-page summaries of each article.

Criminological Highlights is prepared at the University of Toronto by Anthony Doob, Rosemary Gartner, Samantha Aeby, Jacqueline Briggs, Maria Jung, Natasha Madon, Holly Pelvin, Andrea Shier, and Jane Sprott. The Children and Youth edition is compiled by Melissa Sickmund at NCJJ and Anthony Doob and Rosemary Gartner at the University of Toronto. Views ? expressed or implied ? in this publication are not necessarily those of the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General, the National Center for Juvenile Justice, or the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges.

Full issues of Criminological Highlights are available at criminology.utoronto.ca and directly by email. Email Anthony.Doob@utoronto.ca or Rosemary.Gartner@utoronto.ca if you would like to be added to the email distribution list. The Children and Youth edition is also available from and

? Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto 14 Queen's Park Crescent West | Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3K9

Volume 3, Number 3

Headlines & Conclusions

January 2016

Restorative justice conferences involving victims and offenders carried out, largely, on those who had been found guilty, led to small reductions in subsequent offending.

"Restorative justice conferences... appear [to] be likely to reduce the future frequency of detected and prosecutable crimes among the kinds of offenders who are willing to consent to Restorative Justice Conferences when victims are also willing to give consent to the process.... The operational basis of holding such conferences at all depends on consent..." (p. 19). However, "the effects of RJCs on the frequency of repeat offending are especially clear as a supplement to conventional justice, with less certainty about its effects when used as a substitute. Yet RJCs may be seen as most appealing when they can both reduce crime and save money ? starting with diversion from expensive court process. The use of restorative processes in this way has grown rapidly in some countries without rigorous testing" (p. 20).

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The effect of experiencing child physical abuse on violence in adolescence is weakest in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

Although being abused as a child was associated with higher levels of violent behaviour as an adolescent, this effect was reduced considerably in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. This may be the result of the fact that "in disadvantaged neighbourhood, where violent behaviours are in general more abundant, violence is more likely to be seen as a somewhat common, legitimate, or necessary way of interacting with others, at least under some circumstances" (p. 239). Alternatively, in more advantaged neighbourhoods, "for youth who [generally] experience few risk factors, the effect of any one risk factor is more readily expressed and potentially more detrimental" (p. 241).

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The imprisonment of parents increases the property offending of their sons.

The incarceration of a parent appears to have a negative impact on male children above and beyond pre-existing disadvantages that children of incarcerated parents might experience. Combined with other findings suggesting that incarceration itself may either increase the likelihood of reoffending or have no effect on re-offending (Criminological Highlights 11(1)#1, 11(4)#2, 11(6)#4, 12(5)#8), it is likely that policies that lead to the incarceration of offenders can simultaneously have an impact on their future criminal behaviour as well as that of their sons.

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Banishing people from certain areas of cities, without the need for a formal determination of wrongdoing, has become a new way of controlling those deemed to be disorderly.

Banishment orders are justified as methods of creating order. But for the banished, "Being excluded was often a powerful emotional experience, one that confirmed their sense that they were no longer considered citizens, even fully human, by other residents of Seattle.... The use of [these orders] rendered the lives of some of Seattle's most vulnerable residents more difficult and precarious. The insistence that these exclusion orders are nonpunitive in nature is thus in marked tension with the experiences of the banished" (p. 34). There was, on the other hand, no evidence that banishment had any positive impact on those subject to them or the community at large.

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Volume 3, Number 3

Headlines & Conclusions

January 2016

Residents of Canada, the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand who believe that people are responsible for - and should be held responsible for - their own economic welfare also believe that sentences are too lenient.

The results support the conclusion that economic individualism and dispositional attributions of crime are linked to punitive attitudes. "Relatively consistently across the countries studied, a belief that success is the product of hard work and a preference for individual responsibility for one's own economic wellbeing predicts support for punitive sentencing" (p. 39).

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Records of arrests by police not leading to convictions make it difficult to get a job.

When applying for entry level jobs, it would seem that people are slightly disadvantaged if they have a record of misdemeanour arrest. However, the effect is not large. Furthermore, the presence of an African-American in the workplace ? which reduces the size of the effect of a low level record for other African-American ? suggests the possibility that these employers are familiar with the fact that these nonconviction records do not predict workplace behaviour.

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Volume 3, Number 3

Article 1

January 2016

Restorative justice conferences involving victims and offenders carried out, largely, on those who had been found guilty, led to small reductions in subsequent offending.

Many claims are made about the effectiveness of restorative justice practices in the criminal justice system. Few have been substantiated with adequate data. In an attempt to evaluate whether restorative justice conferences reduce repeat offending, this study carefully examined 519 studies that purported to have relevant findings. Unfortunately, only 10 of these studies were adequately carried out to the extent that inferences about their effectiveness in reducing re-offending could be made.

"The diverse nature of [restorative justice] practices makes it difficult to answer the question of whether `restorative justice' defined so broadly works better than conventional justice ... Most of the practices described as restorative justice have never been subjected to controlled field tests" (p. 2). Restorative justice conferences (RJC) have, however, been evaluated. In this paper, studies were examined in which the offence involved an actual victim (in contrast to offences such as impaired driving) and in which cases were assigned on a random (or quasi-random) basis to be resolved with an RJC or by conventional criminal justice approaches. The ten studies were carried out in the US (1 study), the UK (7 studies) and Australia (2 studies). Assessment of the effectiveness of the RJC treatment was assessed on the basis of the treatment to which people were randomly assigned. Some of those assigned to the RJC treatment, in the end, did not receive it. To avoid selection effects, the effect of the assigned (not received) treatment was examined. Between 68% and 92% of those assigned to RJC received this treatment. Four studies involved diversion from prosecution or caution. In 4 studies, the RJC took place

post-plea, presentence. Two involved RJC after sentence (while the offender was in prison or on probation). 6 studies involved adult offenders; 4 involved young offenders.

There was an average repeat offending rate decrease (across all studies) of 0.15 standard deviations in the two years following the assignment. Hypothetically, if in a given study people without the RJC were likely to commit 2 offences on average and most (95%) committed between 0 and 4 offenses, this would mean that on average the RJC participants would have on average 1.85 repeat offences. There was some suggestion that RJC showed a slightly larger effect when the crime involved was violent, and involved adults rather than youths. These differences were not, however, statistically significant.

Conclusion: "Restorative justice conferences... appear [to] be likely to reduce the future frequency of detected and prosecutable crimes among the kinds of offenders who are willing to consent to Restorative Justice Conferences when victims are also willing to give consent to the process.... The operational basis of holding such

conferences at all depends on consent..." (p. 19). However, "the effects of RJCs on the frequency of repeat offending are especially clear as a supplement to conventional justice, with less certainty about its effects when used as a substitute. Yet RJCs may be seen as most appealing when they can both reduce crime and save money ? starting with diversion from expensive court process. The use of restorative processes in this way has grown rapidly in some countries without rigorous testing" (p. 20).

Reference: Sherman, Lawrence W., Heather Strang, Evan Mayo-Wilson, Daniel J. Woods, and Barak Ariel (2015). Are Restorative Justice Conferences Effective in Reducing Repeat Offending? Findings from a Campbell Systematic Review. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 31(1), 1-24.

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Volume 3, Number 3

Article 2

January 2016

The imprisonment of parents increases the property offending of their sons.

It is well established that crime tends to run in families. There are many explanations for cross-generational similarity in the involvement in crime such as similarity in levels of economic deprivation or child rearing methods, social learning, etc. This paper looks at the cross-generational similarity in a different way, suggesting that there may be an independent effect of parental incarceration on the criminal behaviour of children.

This study examines data obtained from a sample of boys in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who were first interviewed when they were between 7 and 13 years old. They were then followed for 12 years. The youths were chosen, in part, because they were considered to be at high risk for offending. The child and a parent (typically the mother) were interviewed every six months for the duration of the study. The youth's involvement in property crimes (thefts, purse snatching, automobile thefts and stealing from a car, and breaking and entering), as well as marijuana use were examined.

The challenge, in terms of determining whether incarceration of parents has any effect on children, is that "Because parental incarceration is associated with parental criminality, antisocial behaviour, and multiple other childhood risk factors, children of incarcerated parents may already be at risk for problem behaviour before their parent is incarcerated" (p. 270). In order to control for such pre-existing factors, the offending risk for children whose parents were subsequently incarcerated was assessed in comparison to a control group that was created consisting of similar youths. Because some of the parents had been incarcerated in the past (i.e. before the study period), this study does not look only at the impact of the first incarceration of a parent but rather at the impact of incarceration after the beginning of the study.

For each child with a parent who was incarcerated during the study period, three children in the study were located who were very similar but who did not have an incarcerated parent. The children without an incarcerated parent were comparable to the child with the incarcerated parent on 14 measures, including the following: age of the child, criminal history and incarcerations of the parent, parental supervision of the child, offending by the child, school performance, and relationship of the child with peers and family.

Compared to the matched controls, youths were more likely to commit property crimes in each year after the incarceration of a parent. The design allowed children to be followed for up to 6 years after the parental incarceration. There were no effects of parental incarceration on marijuana use by the children, depression, or academic performance. Subsequent analyses suggest that much of the impact of parental incarceration is related to reduced involvement of the boy with the family (as assessed by the family and the youth) and to the boy's involvement with delinquent peers. The results also showed that the effect of parental incarceration on White youths might be larger than the effect on Black youths.

Conclusion: The incarceration of a parent appears to have a negative impact on male children above and beyond pre-existing disadvantages that children of incarcerated parents might experience. Combined with other findings suggesting that incarceration itself may either increase the likelihood of re-offending or have no effect on reoffending (Criminological Highlights 11(1)#1, 11(4)#2, 11(6)#4, 12(5)#8), it is likely that policies that lead to the incarceration of offenders can simultaneously have an impact on their future criminal behaviour as well as that of their sons.

Reference: Murray, Joseph, Rolf Loeber, and Dustin Pardini (2012). Parental Involvement in the Criminal Justice System and the Development of Youth Theft, Marijuana Use, Depression and Poor Academic Performance. Criminology, 50 (1) 255-302.

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