ABSTRACT
In Miller v. Alabama (2012), the Supreme Court abolished mandatory juvenile life without parole (JLWOP) sentences and subsequently decided that the ruling applied retroactively (Montgomery v. Louisiana, 2016), effectively rendering thousands of inmates eligible for resentencing and potential release from prison. In its decisions, the Court cited developmental science, noting that youth, by virtue of their transient immaturity, are less culpable and more amenable to rehabilitation relative to their adult counterparts. Specifically, the Court notes adolescents' propensity for impulsive action, sensitivity to social influence, and difficulty understanding long-term consequences. Even so, these rulings raised concerns regarding the consequences of releasing prisoners who had committed heinous crimes as juveniles. Several years after the Court's decision, preliminary data are now available to shed light on rates of recidivism among those released. The current paper comprises three goals. First, we discuss the science of adolescent development and how it intersects with legal practice, contextualizing the Court's decision. Second, we present recidivism data from a sample of individuals formerly sentenced to JLWOP in Pennsylvania who were resentenced and released under Miller and Montgomery (N = 287). Results indicate that 15 individuals received new criminal charges up to 7 years postrelease (5.2%), the majority of which were nonviolent offenses. This low rate of recidivism is consistent with the developmental science documenting compromised decision-making during the adolescent years, followed by desistance from criminal behavior in adulthood. Lastly, we discuss the importance of interdisciplinary collaborations between researchers and legal practitioners, as well as critical future avenues of research in this area.
ABSTRACT
Antisocial and illegal behavior generally declines as youth approach adulthood, but there is significant individual variation in the timing of the peak and decline of offending from adolescence to young adulthood. There are two primary research questions in the present study. First, are there subgroups of youth who follow similar patterns of offending over the nine years after their first arrest? Second, what baseline factors predict which youth will follow each pattern of offending? Data were drawn from the Crossroads study, which includes a sample of racially and ethnically diverse boys who were interviewed regularly for 9 years following their first arrest. Boys were between 13 and 17 years old at the start of the study and were approximately 24-25 years old at the final interview. Trajectories were measured with youths' self-reported offending using latent class growth analysis (LCGA). Results indicated that there were four subgroups of youth: a stable low group (55%), an escalating group (23%), a short-term recidivist group (15%), and a persistently high group (7%). Several baseline factors distinguished the groups. In particular, the results indicated that youth who were informally processed after their first arrest were more likely to be in the low offending group than any of the other LCGA groups. Age at first arrest, peer delinquency, exposure to violence, substance use, callous-unemotional traits, physical aggression, and perceptions of police legitimacy were also significantly related to group membership. Results suggest that certain risk factors identified after youths' first arrest may predict which youth continue to offend and which desist.
