Justice involvement prediction as individuals age: An age-graded evaluation of the public safety assessment.

OBJECTIVE: Some scholars have criticized pretrial assessments for perpetuating racial bias in the criminal legal system by offering biased predictions of future legal system outcomes. Although these critiques have some empirical support, the scholarship has yet to examine the predictive validity and differential prediction of pretrial assessments across individuals by their age. Following the guidance of the life-course literature, the present study serves as the first age-graded evaluation of the Public Safety Assessment (PSA) focused on assessing whether the predictive validity and scoring predictions of the tool vary across the lifespan. HYPOTHESES: We expected that the predictive validity of the PSA scores would vary across the lifespan, such that the PSA underpredicts for younger individuals and overpredicts for older individuals. METHOD: The present study relied on pretrial information collected from 31,527 individuals during the Advancing Pretrial Policy and Research project. Logistic regression models were estimated to evaluate the differential prediction of the PSA for individuals ranging from 18 to 68 years of age. The results of bivariate models were used to produce area under the curve estimates at each year of age. RESULTS: The results of the present study provided some evidence that the PSA differentially predicted pretrial outcomes for individuals from 18 to 68 years of age. Specifically, the predictive validity of the New Criminal Arrest and the New Violent Criminal Arrest scales appears to improve as individuals become older, suggesting that these instruments are better able to predict pretrial outcomes for older individuals relative to younger individuals. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that the PSA is a valid predictor of pretrial outcomes and that the predictive validity of some PSA scores is impacted by age. These findings suggest that the age of the defendant should be accounted for when interpreting the new criminal arrest and new violent criminal arrest scores. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Similarity of friends versus nonfriends in adolescence: Developmental patterns and ecological influences.

This study examines developmental change across adolescence in the similarity of friends versus nonfriends. This differential in similarity is a key aspect of the organization of the peer context of development: The stronger the correlation between friends for an attribute, the more the attribute delineates clustering and divisions of friendships. We investigated change in the correlation between friends across 12 attributes covering demographics, orientations to key institutions (family, school, religion), and problem behavior, and we expected that the link between similarity and friendship would increase during adolescence for most attributes other than gender. We also predicted that the social ecological factors of school size and attribute variability would be associated with stronger correlations between friends and partially mediate developmental change. Data are from two grade cohorts of 27 small school districts, followed from sixth through 11th grades (N = 454 time-specific networks and over 65,000 person/waves of data; 84.2% White, 6.8% Hispanic/Latino, 3.2% African American, 1.3% Asian, .5% Native American, 3.9% other or multiple). The data analysis takes the form of a three-level random effects meta-analysis of network level correlations between friends (Moran's I). As expected, declining dominance of gender was offset by the emergence of moderate correlations across a broader profile of attributes. The ecological opportunity factors of grade cohort size and attribute variability significantly mediated these increases in correlations between friends, accounting for 23 to 73% of age-related change for 10 of the 11 attributes other than gender. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).