Characterizing the Juvenile Justice Response to Adjudicated Girls

• In Event: Examining Responses to Girls in the Juvenile Justice System: Needs, Programming, and Gender-Responsive Approaches

Abstract

Understanding juvenile justice responses specific to girls is an underdeveloped area of inquiry. Previous research on justice-involved girls has generally focused on risk factors and characteristics of girls and their proximal environments (e.g., family systems). There is less research on how the juvenile justice system responds to girls from a programmatic perspective (e.g., sanction-based responses, treatment-focused services). This study aims to fill that gap by using latent class analysis to develop profiles of juvenile justice responses based on a sample of 1,133 adjudicated girls. Profiles were developed using 13 unique program codes based on different types and combinations of system responses. These profiles were characterized by the traits of individual girls such as sociodemographic and criminogenic risk factors as precursors to the systems response and also characterized by the outcomes of these programmatic and placement profiles through examining recidivism rates. Future directions and implications for research, policy, and practice related to system-involved girls are discussed.

Author

• Valerie Anderson, University of Cincinnati