Carol A Schubert

• University of Pittsburgh

The juvenile justice system is charged with the welfare of the children it serves, yet less is known about the prosocial behaviors of adolescent youthful offenders. This study identifies patterns of prosocial behavior for 7 years among serious adolescent offenders, the correlates of each pattern, and associated patterns of secure placement. Using 7...

Objective To examine several risk and protective factors as predictors of future gun violence among male juvenile offenders. Method Data came from a longitudinal cohort of 1,170 male juvenile offenders (42.1% Black; 34.0% Latino; 19.2% White) ages 14–19 who were adjudicated for a serious offense. Interviews were conducted with participants every 6...

Gun violence takes a significant toll on adolescents in the United States, and there is a lack of longitudinal research on perceptual factors that drive gun carrying. Notably, there is no information on the relationship between perception of gun accessibility and gun carrying. Using data collected between 2000 and 2006 in the Pathways to Desistance...

This study examines employment and educational outcomes for justice-involved adolescents with and without mental health disorders in the Pathways to Desistance study. We examine the patterns of education and employment and the effects of several factors, including the presence of a mental health disorder, on these positive outcomes. Three findings...

ObjectivesA broad research literature in criminology documents key aspects of how criminal offending develops and changes over the life span. We contribute to this literature by showcasing methods that are useful for studying medium-term patterns of subsequent criminal justice system involvement among a sample of serious adolescent offenders making...

This study identifies longitudinal patterns of institutional placement to begin to understand experiences in the juvenile justice system. We used monthly calendar data from the Pathways to Desistance study (N = 1,354), which focuses on understanding how serious adolescent offenders desist from antisocial activity. Youth between 14 and 18 years of a...

Objective Although studies have found that youth exposed to violence are more likely to carry guns than non-exposed youth, this association could be due to common causal factors or other pre-existing differences between individuals. In this study, within-individual change models were used to determine whether juvenile offenders exhibit an increased...

Adolescent gun violence is a serious public health issue that disproportionately affects young Black males. Although it has been postulated that differential exposure to childhood risk factors might account for racial differences in adolescent gun carrying, no longitudinal studies have directly examined this issue. We examined whether childhood ris...

Juveniles who have committed sexual offenses are subject to specialized treatment and policies based on their assumed unique dangerousness, despite contradictory evidence. Limited information is available regarding risk factors and their relationships to outcomes in this population. The comparative frequency and predictive utility of empirically su...

The relationship between victimization and offending has been shown consistently across different samples, settings, and crime types. This study uses data from the Pathways to Desistance Study to examine dual trajectories of offending between the ages of 15 and 24 in a sample of male felony offenders. The dual trajectory models demonstrate substant...

Both targeted programs and wholesale changes are sorely needed in how individuals with mental illness are processed in the criminal justice system. Mental illness is not as directly related to criminal involvement or violence as is often assumed. Mentally ill individuals are nonetheless disproportionately present in jails and prisons. Efforts to re...

Numerous factors have been posited to promote desistance from criminal offending in late adolescence and early adulthood. Research in this area has generally examined these factors for their impact on offending for a period shortly after the occurrence or shifts in possible predictors. The current study takes a slightly different approach. It exami...

Purpose: We examine whether and how much risk/need indicators change over time in a sample of serious adolescent offenders and whether changes in risk are related to self-reported and official record reports of offending in the year following assessment. Methods: Growth curve and multilevel mixed-effects models are used to examine change through...

The current study examined whether there is a bidirectional association between changes in alcohol use and psychopathic features during the transition into emerging adulthood. The nature of this association was investigated among a large sample of serious male adolescent offenders (N ϭ 1,170) across 7 annual assessments (ages ϳ17–23), with a focus...

This study examines the relationship between level of supervision by the juvenile probation officers (JPO) and an adolescent's offending, considering the characteristics of juvenile offenders (specifically, level of psychopathy). Data are taken from the Pathways to Desistance Study on a subset of 859 juvenile offenders. We found that the level of p...

It is known that youth engaged in the juvenile justice system show high rates of psychiatric disorders. However, little is known about the course of those disorders over time, or about mental health service use on the part of children and families during justice system involvement. Boys and girls recruited from their first contact with juvenile cou...

We examine the extent to which the relationship between mental health and substance use problems and the risk of rearrest varies across race/ethnicity. Data from the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of serious adolescent offenders, are used to estimate the risk of rearrest over time. Results show that mental health (except for substance...

Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement (MD) refers to the freeing of oneself from moral or ethical standards to engage in wrongdoing. Little is known about heterogeneity in MD among serious adolescent offenders, how MD changes over time in the transition from adolescence to early adulthood, and how such heterogeneity corresponds to offending. We u...

This chapter describes the Council of State Governments Consensus Project Report. This report presents a model similar to the Sequential Intercept Model. In some respects the Consensus Project’s model is more detailed. It notes twenty-three specific events and associated recommendations to improve interactions between persons with mental illness an...

Background Much of the research on specialisation in offending tends to show that offending careers are marked by more versatile than specific criminal activity. One key limitation of this research has been that very few studies have used both official records and self-reports to study the longitudinal mix of offences.AimsThis study uses longitudin...

Purpose Both social and human capital have been identified as important and influential sources for success in many different life domains and research shows that investments in the two forms of capital is negatively associated with crime. Three limitations with prior research include the lack of investigation of the capital/crime relationship (1)...

Psychopathy is a complex personality disorder characterized by affective, interpersonal, and behavioral dimensions. Although features of psychopathy have been extended downwardly to earlier developmental periods, there is a discerning lack of studies that have focused on critically important issues such as longitudinal invariance and stability/chan...

Objectives Researchers have used both self-reports and official records to measure the prevalence and frequency of crime and delinquency. Few studies have compared longitudinally the validity of these two measures across gender and race/ethnicity in order to assess concordance. Methods Using data from the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal stu...

The active involvement of parents – whether as recipients, extenders, or managers of services - during their youth’s experience with the juvenile justice system is widely assumed to be crucial. Parents and family advocacy groups note persisting concerns with the degree to which successful parental involvement is achieved. Justice system providers a...

The popularity of crisis intervention teams (CITs) for law enforcement agencies has grown dramatically over the past decade. Law enforcement agencies and advocates for individuals with mental illness view the model as a clear improvement in the way the criminal justice system handles individuals with mental illness. There is, however, only limited...

Much criminological research has used longitudinal data to assess change in offending over time. An important feature of some data sources is that they contain cross-sections of different aged individuals followed over successive time periods, thereby potentially conflating age and time. This article compares the substantive conclusions about the r...

Purpose: Juvenile offenders are at heightened risk of death in adolescence and young adulthood compared to adolescents in the general population. The current study extends previous research by testing the joint contributions of distal (historical and demographic characteristics) and proximal (closer to the time of the death) predictors of mortalit...

Little is known about how adolescents curtail their offending and make positive adjustments to early adulthood. The Pathways to Desistance study follows 1,354 serious adolescent offenders to provide information about these processes. This paper summarizes some initial findings from the study and lays out their potential policy implications. The fin...

Social scientists have long recognized that individual experiences in particular settings shape behavior, and as a result, many service sectors regularly evaluate client perceptions. This is not the case in the juvenile justice system. Using a sample of 519 serious juvenile offenders (92% male, ethnically diverse) from two sites, this study evaluat...

To investigate the relations among certain mental health problems (MHPs; affective, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD], and substance use disorders), criminogenic risk, and outcomes in a sample of serious adolescent offenders. Using data from a longitudinal study of serious adolescent offenders (N = 949; mean age = 16 years, S...

We examined antisocial adolescents' perceptions of the importance of and their ability to accomplish positive life outcomes (e.g., employment) and avoid negative ones (e.g., arrests) during their transition from adolescence to young adulthood. Participants were 1,354 adolescents from the Pathways to Desistance project, a multisite longitudinal stud...

The juvenile court was established to separate adolescent offenders from the potentially harmful effects of involvement in the adult criminal justice system. Due to glitches in this plan, there have been mechanisms for transferring particular adolescents to the adult criminal justice system and punishing them accordingly. The debate about the appro...

Institutional care is an enduring component of the continuum of care in the juvenile justice system, yet youth perceptions of the placement experience are often overlooked as a source of information about this practice. Little attention is paid to how institutional placements are received by youth as opposed to how they are conceived by the justice...

Because many serious adolescent offenders reduce their antisocial behavior after court involvement, understanding the patterns and mechanisms of the process of desistance from criminal activity is essential for developing effective interventions and legal policy. This study examined patterns of self-reported antisocial behavior over a 3-year period...

Extant research regarding juvenile transfer has focused primarily on the negative effects of current policies, with little consistent and rigorous work on the variation among the adolescents transferred to adult court and their later adjustment in the community. Using a sample of 193 transferred youth from Arizona, we consider how certain individua...

Prior research indicates that adolescent offenders transferred to adult court are more likely to recidivate than those retained in the juvenile system. The studies supporting this conclusion, however, are limited in addressing the issue of heterogeneity among transferred adolescents. This study estimates the effect of transfer on later crime using...

The effect of sanctions on subsequent criminal activity is of central theoretical importance in criminology. A key question for juvenile justice policy is the degree to which serious juvenile offenders respond to sanctions and/or treatment administered by the juvenile court. The policy question germane to this debate is finding the level of confine...

Psychiatric symptoms play a crucial role in psychology and psychiatry. However, little is known about how dimensions of symptoms--other than symptom level--relate to psychiatric outcomes. Until recently, methods for measuring dynamic aspects of symptoms have not been available to clinicians or researchers. The authors sought to test whether systema...

This study examined the community reentry process among 413 serious adolescent offenders released from juvenile court commitments in two metropolitan areas. Data are provided about postrelease court supervision and community-based services (CBSs) during the first 6 months in the community as well as indicators of antisocial activity, formal system...

The juvenile justice system faces a difficult challenge when providing services to serious adolescent offenders, having to balance community safety concerns with hopes for successful intervention. Increasing the effectiveness of this system rests partially on having a clearer picture of the regularities of current service provision to these adolesc...

Empirical studies of violence and mental illness have used many different methods. Current state-of-the-art methods gather information from both subject and collateral interviews as well as official records. Typically these sources are treated as additive. Any report of a violent incident from any source is treated as true and all reported incident...

Given the availability of violence risk assessment tools, clinicians are now better able to identify high-risk patients. Once these patients have been identified, clinicians must monitor risk state and intervene when necessary to prevent harm. Clinical practice is dominated by the assumption that increases in psychiatric symptoms elevate risk of im...

Prior research has consistently demonstrated an association between substance use and involvement in violence among individuals with mental illness. Yet little is known about the temporal quality of this relationship, largely because longitudinal data required to address this issue are not readily available. This study examined the relationship bet...

Mental health professionals' (MHPs') accuracy in assessing the risk of violence in female patients is particularly limited. Based on assessments made by 205 MHPs of 605 patients in an emergency room, this study explored potential causes of MHPs' poorer accuracy in assessing women's potential for violence. The dimensions that underlie MHPs' envision...

To address several key questions in social science research, repeated interviews of individuals drawn from difficult populations are required. This article describes an approach for addressing the challenges associated with longitudinal interview studies, including locating research participants, obtaining reliable and valid interview data over tim...

Understanding factors that contribute to mental health professionals' (MHPs') accuracy in assessing patients risk of violence can inform efforts to improve accuracy and to integrate risk assessment technology with practice. Based on a sample of 147 clinicians who assessed 680 patients in a psychiatric emergency room, this study investigates the inf...

Improving juvenile court decision making requires information about how serious adolescent offenders desist from antisocial activity. A systematic research agenda on this topic requires consideration of several processes, including normative development in late adolescence, what constitutes desistance, and the factors likely to promote the end of i...

Because different methods for studying criminal behavior all suffer from important limitations, it is useful to apply different methodologies to the same population whenever possible. In this analysis, we examine the relationships between self-report and official record-based measures of offending activity using populations of adolescent serious of...

Implementing a large, longitudinal study of any sample is a major undertaking. The challenges are compounded when the study involves multiple sites and a high-risk sample. This article outlines the methodology for the Pathways to Desistance study, a multisite, longitudinal study of serious juvenile offenders, and discusses the key operational decis...

Recent studies indicate that a small, but critical subgroup of psychiatric patients is involved in a disproportionately large number of violent incidents among the mentally ill. This subgroup is an appropriate focus for intensive community-based treatment programs designed to reduce violence. However, little research has been conducted on methods f...