NCJ Number
234542
Journal
Journal of Criminal Justice Volume: 39 Issue: 2 Dated: March/April 2011 Pages: 198-204
Date Published
April 2011
Length
7 pages
Annotation
This study determined the predictive validity of the Teen Court Peer Influence Scale (TCPIS), which was developed to assist juvenile justice officials in selecting which juvenile offenders are best suited for participation in teen courts, which allows the offender's teen peers to hear the facts of the case, deliberate, and determine the disposition (sentence) the juvenile will receive.
Abstract
A condition for a juvenile offenders processing by a teen court is that he/she must first admit guilt. The teen court only decides on the sentence. The TCPIS was developed to assist in standardizing decisions as to whether individual juvenile offenders are likely to succeed in teen court diversion program. If the TCPIS is able to make accurate predictions as to which juveniles are more likely to succeed in a teen court setting, it may be a valuable tool for juvenile justice decisionmakers. The study found that all hypotheses were supported, with the TCPIS accounting for a significant amount of variance among each of the delinquency measures, thus strengthening the predictive validity of the measure. With additional testing, the TCPIS could be a useful tool for decisionmakers in determining which juvenile offenders would be the best fit for teen court diversion programs. The TCPIS was administered to a nonprobability sample of teen court participants (n=404) from September 2006 to February 2007 across 7 teen court sites in Florida. Dependent measures for the validity analysis were developed from the Youth Self-administered Questionnaire and included social bonds, prosocial attitudes, delinquent peer associations, positive perceptions of teen court, and perceived delinquency. 4 tables and 55 references