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

• Author: Jonathan W. Caudill,Andy Hochstetler,Gloria Jones- Johnson,James W. Marquart,Matt DeLisi
• DOI: 10.1177/1541204010396107
• Published date: 01 July 2011
• Date: 01 July 2011
• Subject Matter: Articles

The Road to Murder: The

Enduring Criminogenic

Effects of Juvenile

Confinement Among a

Sample of Adult Career

Criminals

Matt DeLisi

1

, Andy Hochstetler

1

, Gloria Jones- Johnson

1

,

Jonathan W. Caudill

2

, and James W. Marquart

3

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, careerviolent index arrests, and career property index arrests. Receiver operating character-

istics–area under the curve (ROC-AUC) graphs showed that juvenile confinement predicted murder

significantly but modestly betterthan chance although career violent offending was thestrongest pre-

dictor of murder perpetration.

Keywords

juvenile confinement, murder, homicide offending, delinquent careers, criminal careers

Introduction

Commitment to a confinement facility is the most severe sanction in the juvenile justice system. This

deep-end placement is disproportionately reserved for the most chronic and violent juvenile

1

Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

2

California State University, Chico, CA, USA

3

The University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX, USA

Corresponding Author:

Matt DeLisi, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA

Email: delisi@iastate.edu

Youth Violence and JuvenileJustice

9(3) 207-221

ªThe Author(s) 2011

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DOI: 10.1177/1541204010396107

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