Prairie View A&M University

In a 1959 article, Talcott Parsons advised sociologists to protect the discipline by maintaining scientific rigor and objectivity as well as by separating the study of sociology from its application or practice. This idea has long been the center for academic debate over the desirability of the study of the applied in the college curriculum. Yet just what constitutes "the applied" is in and of itself confusing. Many of the sub-areas of sociology identified by Odum (1951) lend themselves to applied study but are also handled in the theoretical realm. In many departments, truces have been forged that allow both theoretical and applied approaches to co-exist. However, as new areas of study evolve, questions arise as to whether they are simply applied extensions of existing sociological paradigms, or are themselves new disciplines.

In a "chicken-or-the-egg" analysis one might argue that new disciplines are generated in a progressive, linear fashion. As theory evolves, it becomes more specific and the generation of sub-specialties (that may become their own disciplines) is a natural by-product of a developing discipline. On the other hand, one could argue that new disciplines are created somewhat independently in the applied or public sector and then go in search of an academic home. After an issue generates scholarly interest, theoretical explanations follow which then progress to an identity within an academic area. As an example, both of these approaches could be used to explain the emergence of juvenile justice as an offshoot of both sociological criminology and criminal justice (which is itself an offshoot of sociology).

The view of juvenile justice as an outgrowth of related fields accepts that although it is a logical extension of criminology and criminal justice, it has not been adequately addressed by either one. Perhaps the first place to uncover some of the reasons for this lack of attention to juvenile justice is in the beginnings and history of academic criminology and criminal justice. We briefly trace this history as a mode of explaining current concerns.

Criminology began life as an offshoot of concern about the penology of the day by religious figures and social reformers. The mid-1800s demonstrate a substantial amount of ministerially-oriented writing in the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons’ Journal of Prison Discipline and Philanthropy. In fact, the experts were virtually all reformers and ministers whose focus was necessarily on adult institutions because there were no juvenile versions. Indeed, the juvenile versions were not to arrive until the turn of the century. Between the midpoint and the end of the century, criminology had become scientific and was frequently referred to as "criminal anthropology" with a focus on biological and genetic features of adult offenders. Again, there was little reference to juveniles.

As the Twentieth Century arrived, a juvenile justice system was emerging, particularly in the form of juvenile courts, and criminology was becoming a "social" science—in large part due to the influence of the new Chicago School of Sociology (Bernard, 1929). The Chicago School began the study of juveniles and juvenile delinquency in social settings, developed theories and methodologies, and to a large extent ushered in a tradition of examining delinquency from a sociological viewpoint. (1) The scholars holding this perspective originally undertook to study delinquency and develop preventive mechanisms, although these mechanisms were social in nature. There was also some attempt to study the official systems responsible for handling delinquents, but that remained a minor concern (Carey, 1975; Hunter, 1980).

On the whole, this picture continues to describe the state of juvenile-oriented criminology. Studies of crime rather than delinquency became paramount (2), perhaps because of the emergence of the Uniform Crime Reports as a source of data—there were no comparable national statistics on juvenile crime—and perhaps because of the sheer size of the adult-oriented criminal justice system. Nowhere is this more evident than in criminological textbooks, where the treatment of delinquency and the juvenile justice system is virtually nonexistent(3). Discussions of crime evidence and measurement invariably involve adults, penology is largely a treatise on adult institutions, legal matters are primarily oriented toward the operation of the criminal justice system.

However, it is also true that any discussion of the disciplinary "ownership" of juvenile delinquency would have to place it squarely in sociological criminology. Those who work in this subarea of criminology see it as entirely different from juvenile justice, as evidenced by the separation of textbooks ("juvenile delinquency" for sociology courses and "juvenile justice" for criminal justice courses). Perhaps this is a major reason why the two areas have not been consolidated, as a rational approach to the subject would seem to dictate.

Criminal justice, as a discipline, began to emerge in the 1960s as an interest in "police science" (Morn, 1996). The distinction between criminology and this new academic interest was primarily in a perceived difference between studying behavior and administrative studies meeting the needs of police organizations. By the 1970s the federal government was funding this new study of criminal justice organizations, with the express intent of improving the efficiency of the criminal justice system. The emerging discipline of criminal justice may well owe its conceptual foundation to this search for system efficiency. However, our examination of publications during these years yields very little discussion of the juvenile system—the adult system was simply too pervasive and its needs were too great. As criminal justice gathered its resources as a discipline, it embraced the theoretical emphasis of criminology by incorporating it under a general umbrella of the study of crime, criminal justice systems, and legal matters. In retrospect, it was perhaps the title of the new discipline more than anything else that obviated a direct interest in juvenile justice systems. In other words, a criminal justice discipline was based on an adult paradigm.

The 1980s and 1990s saw the maturing of academic criminal justice and the emergence of several doctoral programs. Those who taught the subject tended to split from parent departments in sociology and, less frequently, political science (4), although a good number of independent programs were formed (Morn, 1996). The source disciplines of the faculty in these departments were important in determining the orientation of the programs and that was usually sociology. In addition, the faculty were important in another area—that of developing criminal justice as a discipline.

The one true difference between criminal justice and sociological criminology was the emphasis on efficiency and administration concerns within the criminal justice system (5). Moreover, faculty in these new programs, especially the doctoral programs, frequently espoused an interdisciplinary philosophy (perhaps in no small part to distance their departments from sociology and political science). Unfortunately, there were very few faculty with interdisciplinary training. Recognizing this problem, the espoused hope was that by having faculty teach from their individual disciplinary viewpoints, the students would transcend the multidisciplinary approach, synthesize the materials and leave with an interdisciplinary perspective.

Where did these diverse faculty come from when the dominant group was sociological in orientation? The answer lies in the attempt to add disciplines—faculty were hired from psychology, economics, history, law, political science and public administration. The primary criterion was that these "diverse" faculty expressed an interest in studying crime or the criminal justice system. As it turned out, this was not enough to create even a multidisciplinary approach for the students. Faculty continued to teach from their own disciplinary perspectives and frequently demeaned the perspectives of others. In the main, the vision of creating a unique, synthetic, interdisciplinary criminal justice discipline fell short. Moreover, studying and teaching about delinquents and the juvenile justice system was not particularly high on the agenda of these non-sociological faculty. The overall result was that the original dominance of the criminal justice system became virtual hegemony (Johnson and Wolfe, 1996).

Juvenile Justice As a Social Problem

In recent years much attention has been focused on the juvenile offender, perceived changes in the types and seriousness of crimes being committed by the juvenile and a controversial variety of possible treatment interventions such as boot camps, corporal punishments and culturally-specific programming. Stories of school shootings, violent gangs, and murders being perpetrated by 7-year-olds have dominated the newspapers and sent practitioners and policy makers scrambling to develop ways to prevent crime, predict and intercept high risk offenders, and implement treatment strategies that will both rehabilitate the offender and protect society. Unfortunately, these sensational events also tend to color the public’s view of juvenile crime and distort perceptions of its nature.

There are now over 70.2 million Americans under the age of 18. Fourteen million of those youths live in poverty and children are less likely to be living with both parents than in the past (Synder and Sickmund, 1999). The media highlight many of the concerns Americans have about risk factors, not only for juvenile criminality but for victimization as well. Rates of homicide and suicide among U.S. children are higher than in other, industrialized countries. Between 1986 and 1993 the number of children abused, neglected or endangered doubled to almost 3 million (Snyder and Sickmund, 1999). The role of guns, drugs, gangs and teen pregnancy are has been hotly argued in terms of their effect on juvenile crime, dropping out of school and unemployment. Myriad social problems, including the lack of health care, housing and recreational opportunities, have been cited in various national reports on youth.

According to the Department of Justice, in 1996 there were 2.9 million arrests of persons under the age of 18. By late 1997 we incarcerated over 110,000 youth, almost 368 per 100,000 youths in the population (Synder & Sickmund, 1999). Legislative enactments have allowed thousands of youths to be prosecuted in adult courts and confined in adult prisons. In addition, many of the trends and problems of the adult criminal justice system are mirrored in the juvenile system. In 1996, Black juveniles were referred to juvenile court at twice the rate of whites and, recently, the arrest rates of girls have increased faster than the rates for boys. The lack of meaningful prevention and intervention efforts have plagued institutions as well as community-based programming.

In short, juvenile justice issues are important ones and substantial numbers of individuals are represented, as offenders, as victims and as agents, within prevention and legal systems. As a result, one would suppose that juvenile justice would be a major facet of study by professionals in the fields of criminal justice and criminology. Unfortunately, that has not been the case.

The relative lack of interest by criminology and criminal justice in the juvenile justice system is only one of the rationales by which a juvenile justice discipline may be defended. Indeed, a lack of interest is sufficient to demand that attention be paid to, but insufficient to justify, a new discipline. We argue that evidence in support of creating a new discipline is necessary in two essential forms. First, the intersection of the proposed new discipline with existing disciplines must exist only tangentially. Second, there must be a distinct direction or perspective that is both unique to the subject (vis-a-vis existing disciplines) and deeply integrated. On these two bases, we believe that evidence exists to justify a separate discipline of juvenile justice.

One approach to defining a discipline is to examine its core undergraduate coursework. Undergraduate programs in criminal justice and criminology tend to list juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice under the category of "elective" courses. This treatment of the subject suggests that juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice are not considered one of the critical subject areas of the discipline of criminal justice. It also implies that juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice may be subjects for practitioners, but not for serious scientific inquiry.

A second method is to examine the practical, or field-oriented, side of the subject. At first glance, the concepts of juvenile justice and criminal justice may appear similar. However, with closer inspection, we find two different systems which converge at only two stages in the processing of a juvenile offender. The juvenile may contact the adult criminal justice system at police intervention and/or arrest, and at waiver (of juveniles accused of serious crimes) to adult courts. In the first instance the juvenile is handled by the police, in lieu of other social service contact, because police departments are twenty-four hour agencies—the ones most likely to be called by citizens and the ones most likely to be present when official social control is needed. Police are additionally involved because of the obvious lack of an analogous law enforcement component within the juvenile justice system.

The second instance of convergence is when juveniles accused of serious crimes are waived by the juvenile courts into the criminal court system. In this process, the delinquent child no longer has protections legally reserved for juveniles, thus the accused juvenile is treated by the criminal courts as an adult in relation to criminal culpability, legal procedure, and correctional action. In essence, therefore, when the accused juvenile receives a waiver into the criminal courts the juvenile justice system loses jurisdiction over the accused child.

In these instances of contact with the "adult" criminal justice system, the suspected or accused child finds him/herself at a disadvantage. In the first, conventional police training includes very few required hours, if any, in juvenile law, developmental psychology, domestic violence, juvenile delinquency, juvenile crime prevention, or other juvenile justice subjects (6). Therefore, police are frequently at a loss about how to handle problem children and often attempt to avoid the task altogether (7).

In the second instance, the criminal courts simply process the accused child as they would an adult. The majority of juveniles receiving waivers to adult criminal courts also are represented by court-appointed attorneys who, with limited training and experience in juvenile issues (if not in criminal law as a whole), tend to convince them to plead guilty to avoid longer sentences. The most unimaginable nightmare awaits these children when they arrive at the adult correctional institutions (McShane and Williams, 1989; Schiraldi and Zeidenberg, 1999).

The second of the required forms of evidence is the presence of a distinct perspective that is both unique and integrative. There are two special perspectives that make juvenile justice a feasible candidate for a disciplinary identity: child development and prevention. We now examine the potential contributions of these two perspectives.

The field of academic study most closely associated with child development is developmental psychology. In general, that field examines patterns of growth change and stability in behavior occurring throughout the life span (8). Some seek to examine universal principles of development, others focus on how cultural, racial and ethnic differences affect development. Those who work in the area of childhood development are currently synthesizing information from neurological studies and brain research to help explain both normal and abnormal progression of behavior among children.

Our review of the literature in the developmental psychology field shows that there is very little discussion about crime, criminal behavior and delinquency, although there is some work on violence and aggression. The fact remains that teenagers are more likely than any other age group to commit crimes. Developmental psychology generally regards these juveniles as undersocialized and raised with little discipline (or alternatively, harsh, uncaring parental supervision) or as inappropriately socialized with few learned standards of conduct to regulate behavior. While such approaches are not unique to developmental psychology (9), it is imperative to incorporate child development processes into an understanding of at-risk children.

Can this incorporation be done under the aegis of existing disciplines? We think not. Because of its sociological focus, criminology is not yet ready to embrace psychological concepts. Criminal justice, with a history of borrowing from other disciplines, has little interest in a perspective far removed from the average adult criminal. A juvenile justice discipline, then, stands uniquely-positioned to assimilate child development concepts in an understanding of both behavior and reaction (i.e., the delinquent and the system).

The second, and different, perspective in juvenile justice is a focus on prevention. Rather than ask what to do about crime and how to improve our system efficiency for handling it, juvenile justice views the key to its subject matter as prevention of delinquent behavior. Thus, juvenile justice is interested in intervening in the behavior/reaction before it gets to the stage of delinquency. While criminology and criminal justice have used prevention strategies in the past, and continue to do so today, the focus of both is elsewhere. Thus, juvenile justice is enmeshed with the juvenile justice system, educational institutions, social programs directed at children, well-children and other health programs, child-rearing and, theoretically, pre-natal care (even programs focusing on neurochemistry). The notion of "at-risk" becomes an all-encompassing task when one considers that any factor involved in creating risk for delinquent or deviant behavior is fair game for prevention (10).

A primary component of prevention in juvenile justice may be described as finding ways to assist children in developing their potential and growing up to become productive and conventional adult citizens. This effort can be effectively aimed at all children, rather than just those who are "at-risk." After all, modern prediction of at-risk behavior in children is less accurate than we would hope; thus, endeavors that benefit all children may be presently as valuable as singling out those identified as being at risk. As a secondary preventive approach, juvenile justice, through its treatment modalities, holds out hope that those already engaged in delinquency and crime may be rescued and therefore develop conventional lifestyles. Juvenile crime prevention is best understood as a continuum of prevention. At one end are all stages of a child’s maturation process and the factors which influence the child’s socialization—which may also be broadened to consider the prenatal development of the child, or even the sex education, family planning, and parenting skills of the child’s parents before conception. At the other end of the continuum are factors relating to the execution of minors in capital punishment cases.

While a cohesive philosophy of juvenile justice is still lacking, a reasonable evaluation of the rationale for treating juvenile justice as a separate discipline suggests the idea has some merit. The combined factors of justice, prevention goals, and developmental study create an orientation that, as a whole, does not exist in any other form. Juvenile justice may be an offshoot of other disciplines, but it clearly evinces the need for an integrative, synthetic approach to the problem of delinquency.

Moreover, the differing perspectives involved in the subject matter of juvenile justice are not capable of standing on their own in the typical multi-disciplinary fashion that characterizes criminal justice. The various elements of the juvenile justice puzzle must be informed by each other rather than each working in a separate direction. Nor can sociology simply incorporate juvenile justice into its unitary framework. While it has shown the ability to incorporate ideas from other disciplines, rarely if ever has sociology included the specialization and methodology from which those ideas arose. Such areas as developmental psychology and prenatal neurochemistry are not part of the cloth of sociology and to incorporate them would result in a revision of their core concepts and assumptions. Thus, rather than add to and create a new paradigm for studying juvenile justice/juvenile delinquency, the ideas and concepts of these necessary areas would be absorbed into an alternative paradigm.

Quite simply, the synthesis of child development with criminological and criminal justice approaches is a mandatory step. It is insufficient to merely teach about the psychological and social progress of children within a child-focused justice format, the development aspects must be integrated into an understanding of the interaction between juvenile behavior and mechanisms of formal social control. And, compared to criminal justice, those mechanisms involve other social institutions (such as schools and the family) as a major contributor to both development and control. Thus, juvenile justice is, of necessity, a synthetic and integrative field with an interdisciplinary approach.

The rationale developed above to support the emergence of juvenile justice as a discipline is not necessarily the only support. There is another, more pragmatic, reason that has long been at the forefront of the development of criminal justice. Despite our preferred faith in zeitgeist and some logical confluence of paradigms in the generation and maintenance of disciplines, a dual and dominant reality for social science higher education in the last century has been funding and number of majors in the various disciplines. Criminal justice took advantage of the supply and demand of contemporary urban social problems and the opportunities they created. Initially positioning itself as an academic add-on, it emerged from sociology and political science departments with a large dowry of career-oriented students, mandated police officer degrees and a wealth of grants (11). The growing acceptance of higher education for personnel spread into the courts, probation and parole agencies and institutional corrections at the same time as the criminal justice system itself grew exponentially. The National Institute of Justice, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, National Institute of Corrections and other government agencies infused funds into universities otherwise unsure of how to finance the growth of enrollment, the credentialing of system personnel and the development of diverse staff for criminal justice agencies.

While a significant portion of academia remains unmoved by the coerciveness of government funding for research, its impact continues to effect the evolution of social-science-related disciplines. If any single group is earmarked for the promise of intervention and rehabilitation, it is juveniles. Therefore it is reasonable to expect juvenile justice to continue as a beneficiary of government largess. Nor is the content of juvenile justice new. There is a one-hundred year history of delinquency prevention programs, from the Chicago Area Projects, Elmstown’s Youth, the Philadelphia birth cohort study, the Cambridge-Somerville study and the Provo and Silver Lake experiments to boot camps, "Scared Straight," and wilderness programs. The field has its "history" and, in the C. Wright Mills tradition, it is the imaginative and creative approaches applied to this cumulative knowledge that will lead to new insights and solutions. What is needed is a synthetic, integrative area of study to develop those imaginative and creative approaches.

The movement toward a juvenile justice discipline requires a new paradigm of thinking: a prevention paradigm which specifically targets children, juveniles, and the environments and institutions of child socialization. The paradigm must be multi-disciplinary, drawing information and support from all disciplines and professions relating to children. It must also include the concept of a broad spectrum or "continuum of prevention," including considerations of socialization, health, and opportunity from the prenatal through the adolescent years and then on to early adulthood. In short, the development of a new, synthetic approach is the essence of the emerging discipline of juvenile justice.

Just as sociology spawned criminology and criminal justice, it now seems time for juvenile justice to emerge as an independent area of study. How then does this new paradigm and discipline take place? There seem to be three preconditions. First, there must be a demand from the public or the applied field for education specialized in the area. In our discussions with those working in juvenile justice agencies, a growing dissatisfaction has been voiced about the dominance of the adult criminal justice focus. There seems to be a need for juvenile-specific information and education. Second, an organizational structure must exist which allows for the emergence of programs and degrees/specializations in juvenile justice. To some extent this is already so, as there are some long-standing research institutes with the necessary number of faculty to deliver a program. Moreover, at the time of this writing, there are at least three U.S. universities with degrees and/or specializations in juvenile justice (12). Third, there must be a critical mass of interested, committed and creative personnel. We have already noted the presence of long-standing research centers and institutions dealing with juvenile delinquency and justice; the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is a major source of interest, ongoing research activity and funding. There are also new research and action centers being developed (and, of course, the new academic programs previously mentioned). Moreover, there are new journals being planned with juvenile justice as their focus (one from a section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and one from an academic institution). As a result, we posit that there is sufficient evidence of interest and long-term commitment. The only question is that of creativity and, as with all academic subject areas, that remains to be seen.

In short, there is already evidence of an emerging juvenile justice discipline and there is a long history and accumulation of literature in the area. The task now is to create the synthetic and integrated research and theory that will signal the true development of the discipline. From our perspective, this can only be done from academic departments committed to such integration.

1. There were other perspectives at the same time (e.g., the work of psychiatrist William Healy [1915] and the entire "feeblemindedness" perspective). We merely note here that, by the late 1920s, sociological criminology was the dominant perspective and remains so today. Indeed, sociology has virtually claimed the field of criminology for the past 80 years. In fact, sociology had its modern beginnings in the study of what today would be called social problems, thus the problems of crime and delinquency were a natural area of interest for early American sociologists.

2. We do not mean to imply that juvenile delinquency was ignored. The evidence clearly indicates that a substantial amount of work in juvenile delinquency has taken place over the years. Some criminologists have even made careers of studying juvenile behavior and one might argue that many of the major criminological studies have been conducted with juveniles (e.g., Cohen, 1955; Short and Nye, 1958; Wolfgang, Figlio and Sellin, 1972; Hirschi, 1969; Elliot, et al., 1985). Any measure of the volume of work in the criminology, though, will show that the majority has been with adult criminals or the criminal justice system.

3. For instance, a review of six leading criminology texts (Adler et al., 1995; Brown, et al., 1996; Hagan, 1998; Reid, 2000; Schmalleger, 1999; Siegel, 2000) fails to turn up a single chapter dealing primarily with juvenile delinquency or the juvenile justice system.

4. While political science departments themselves were not particularly interested in criminal justice, there was a natural affinity with public administration. Political science departments with degree programs in the latter were, then, the most likely to house criminal justice programs.

5. Interestingly, one reason for the orientation of criminal justice curricula was purely an institutional function. The new criminal justice departments had to develop curricula that did not compete with courses in sociology departments.

6. Even the course work required for AA/AS and BA/BS degrees rarely includes these subjects.

7. The authors have had discussions with many police officers/supervisors who espouse this position. They add that an enormous amount of time is associated with detaining a juvenile as opposed to an adult.

8. One reason that developmental psychology is not a "home" for juvenile justice lies in its life-span interests, an approach that theoretically focuses as much on the middle-aged and elderly as it does on juveniles

9. See, for example, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) for a sociological/criminological approach focusing on child development and socialization at an early age.

10. We are sensitive to the relative nature of deviance and problems of definition. In that context, the question becomes "what is one ‘at-risk’ of ?" while remaining careful to avoid entrepreneurial and moralistic definitions of deviance. Pre-deviance intervention, for all its obvious value, must remain vigilant to misuse.

11. A not-unusual comment heard especially during the years when sociology departments were suffering a downturn in the number of majors was that criminal justice usurped the criminological content of their programs and thereby siphoned off students who would otherwise have been in sociology.

12. These are Eastern Kentucky University, Prairie View A&M University, and the University of North Texas.

Adler, F., Mueller, G. O. & Laufer, W. S. (1996). Criminology, 2^nd Ed. New York: McGraw Hill.

Bernard, J. (1929). The history and prospects of sociology in the United States. Pp. 1–71 in G. Lundberg, R. Bain, and N. Anderson (eds.), Trends in American sociology. New York, NY: Harper and Row.

Brown, S. E., Esbensen, F. A. & Geis, G. (2001). Criminology: Explaining crime and its context, 4th Ed.. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

Carey, J. T. (1975). Sociology and public affairs: The Chicago School. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Cohen, A. K. (1955). Delinquent boys: The culture of the gang. New York: Free Press.

Elliot, D. S., Huizinga, D. & Ageton, S. S. (1985). Explaining delinquency and drug use. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.

Gottfredson, M. & Hirschi, T. (1990). A general theory of crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hagan, F. (1998). Introduction to criminology, 4^th Ed. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall.

Healy, W. (1915). The individual delinquent. Boston: Little, Brown.

Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of delinquency. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Hunter, A. (1980). Why Chicago? The rise of the Chicago School of urban social science. American Behavioral Scientist 24: 216–217.

Johnson, H. A., & Wolfe, N. T. (1996). History of criminal justice. Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

McShane, M. & Williams III, F. P. (1989). The prison adjustment of juvenile offenders. Crime and Delinquency 35, 2:254–269.

Morn, F. (1996). Academic politics and the history of criminal justice education. Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Odum, H. W. (1951). American sociology: The story of sociology in the United States through 1950. New York: Longmans, Green.

Parsons, T. (1959), Some problems confronting sociology as a profession. American Sociological Review, 24 (August): 547-559.

Reid, S. T. (2000). Crime and criminology, 9^th Ed. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.

Schiraldi, V., & Zeidenberg, J. (1999). The Florida Experiment: An analysis of the impact of granting prosecutors discretion to try juveniles as adults. Washington, DC: The Justice Policy Institute.

Schmalleger, F. (1999). Criminology today, 2^nd Ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Seigel, L. (2000). Criminology, 7^th Ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Short, J. F. Jr., & Nye, F. I.. (1958). Extent of unrecorded juvenile delinquency: Tentative conclusions. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 49: 296–302.

Synder, H. & Sickmund, M. (1999). Juvenile offenders and victims: 1999 Annual Report. Washington, DC: Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

Wolfgang, M. E., Figlio, R. & Sellin, T. (1972). Delinquency in a birth cohort. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.