Important
- Reasons for less severe youth sanctions – Youth should receive less severe sanctions compared to adults because they are less likely to appreciate the seriousness of their actions, are less able to control their impulses due to an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, are more susceptible to peer influence, and have a greater potential for successful treatment and behavioral change.
- Limited prosocial emotions specifier – A specific DSM-5 specifier for Conduct Disorder used to capture affective psychopathic traits, requiring all youth with a conduct disorder diagnosis to be explicitly assessed for these features.
- Effectiveness of youth diversion – Diversion programs effectively reduce recidivism specifically for low-risk youth, whereas moderate or high-risk youth show no difference in recidivism when diverted compared to when they are incarcerated.
Core Concepts
- Juvenile Delinquents Act (JDA): Legislation enacted in 1908 that established a separate court system for youth ages 7 to 16, utilizing a paternalistic approach to provide guidance and treatment rather than strict punishment.
- Young Offenders Act (YOA): Legislation introduced in 1984 that shifted focus toward holding youth accountable for their actions while continuing to support rehabilitation, setting the new minimum age of criminal responsibility at 12.
- Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA): The current Canadian legislation enacted in 2003 that focuses on preventing youth crime, providing meaningful consequences, and drastically decreasing the use of custody by eliminating transfers to adult court.
- Extrajudicial measures: Informal actions taken by police before charges are laid, such as warnings, police cautions, or community program referrals, to keep youth out of the formal court system.
- Extrajudicial sanctions: Formal diversionary actions applied after a youth is charged, requiring the youth to admit to the offense and complete specific conditions (like counseling or community service) to have the charges withdrawn.
- Age-crime curve: A well-established criminological finding demonstrating that overall crime rates peak at approximately 18 years of age and subsequently decline as individuals enter adulthood.
- Internalizing problems: Emotional and psychological difficulties directed inward toward the self, commonly manifesting as anxiety, depression, and obsessions.
- Externalizing problems: Behavioral difficulties and regulation issues directed outward toward the environment, manifesting as fighting, bullying, lying, or delinquency.
- Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD): An externalizing disorder emerging in preschool years characterized by a persistent pattern of angry, hostile, and defiant behavior toward authority figures.
- Conduct Disorder (CD): A severe disruptive disorder involving chronic rule-breaking, aggression, and property destruction, which often precedes Antisocial Personality Disorder in adulthood.
- Primary intervention strategies: Strategies implemented prior to any violence or criminal behavior occurring, targeting at-risk groups (such as through family-oriented parent training) to decrease the likelihood of future antisocial behavior.
- Secondary intervention strategies: Interventions directed at youth who have had contact with the justice system or exhibited behavioral problems, attempting to provide social and clinical services to prevent further escalation.
- Tertiary intervention strategies: Treatment interventions aimed at chronic, heavily involved young offenders, focusing on minimizing existing risk factors and preventing reoffending.
Theories and Frameworks
- Trajectories of Youthful Offenders: A developmental taxonomy proposing two pathways to antisocial behavior: an adolescent-limited trajectory characterized by normative teenage delinquency that eventually stops, and a life-course persistent trajectory where chronic offending begins in childhood and continues into adulthood.
- Cognitive Model of Conduct-Disordered Behavior: A model suggesting that conduct-disordered youth demonstrate cognitive deficits and distortions during social interactions, processing fewer social cues and frequently relying on aggressive solutions to problems.
- Hostile Attribution Bias: A cognitive distortion where ambiguous social situations are incorrectly interpreted as intentional and hostile acts, leading to emotionally driven reactive aggression.
- Social Learning Theory: A theory proposing that youth acquire aggressive and antisocial behavior by observing others in their environment and experiencing reinforcement for those behaviors.
- Multisystemic Therapy (MST): An intensive secondary intervention framework viewing the delinquent youth as embedded within multiple interconnected systems (family, peers, school), featuring extremely low caseloads and 24/7 therapist availability.
Notable Individuals
- Terry Moffitt: Developed the highly influential developmental trajectories model categorizing youthful offenders into adolescent-limited and life-course persistent pathways.
- Kenneth Dodge: Proposed the cognitive model of conduct-disordered behavior, focusing on hostile attribution bias and distinguishing between reactive and proactive aggression.
- Leena Augimeri: Directed scientific development at the Child Development Institute in Toronto and was central to the research and development of the SNAP (Stop Now And Plan) program.