NCJ Number
249259
Date Published
July 2011
Length
26 pages
Annotation
This study - a product of the University of Pennsylvania's project on "Understanding the 'Whys' Behind Juvenile Crime Trends - examined changes in selected community characteristics in relation to trends in violence by juveniles in a sample of large urban and suburban counties during the 1990s.
Abstract
The study found that the reductions in violence by juveniles between 1994 and 2001 were accelerated by reductions in violence by adults, reductions in unemployment, reductions in concentrated poverty, and reductions in drug offending by juveniles. Other changes that occurred during this period were increases in owner-occupied housing, increases in divorce, and increases in the Hispanic population. These factors related to trends in crime by juveniles varied during different periods of the 1990s; however, their effects were modest and did not explain much of the downward trend in violence by juveniles during this period. This suggests that the decline in violence by juveniles was largely driven by a host of social, cultural, and/or policy factors that operated independently of the changes in the community characteristics examined in this study. The authors caution, however, that this conclusion must be tempered by several limitations to the data and the analysis. The analysis examined changes in violence by juveniles from 1994 through 2001 in a sample of 129 U.S. counties with a population of 250,000 or more as of 1994 and that had high levels of crime reporting to the Uniform Crime reports (UCR) from 1994 through 1998.. The counties in the sample composed 39 percent of the Nation's population in both 1990 and 2000 and accounted for 43 percent of the Nation's decrease in arrests of juveniles on violence charges between 1994 and 1998; however, these counties were not randomly chosen; therefore, caution should be used in extrapolating the results to other counties nationwide. 6 tables and 16 references