Conclusions and Policy Recommendations
Child delinquents constitute a population not usually recognized as needing services to prevent them from becoming tomorrow’s serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders. The Study Group’s work has clear implications for policymakers at the federal, state, county, and municipal levels who can influence the day-to-day and long-term operation of agencies and/or their funding to maintain, improve, or create new programs. Indirectly, the Study Group also addresses the frontline workers who deal every day with child delinquents and children with persistent disruptive behavior, whose voices and concerns should be heard by policymakers.
Policymakers should be concerned about child delinquents and children with persistent disruptive behavior for the key reasons discussed below (Farrington, Loeber, and Kalb, 2001).
Child delinquents constitute a significant problem for society. Child delinquents, compared with later onset offenders, are two to three times more likely to become tomorrow’s serious offenders. Part of this likelihood depends on the presence of risk and protective factors. Stouthamer-Loeber and colleagues (2002) examined the degree to which protective domains buffered the effect of risk domains in the Pittsburgh Youth Study. Using a total score of protective and risk domains for each participant, the study found that children whose balance between protective and risk domains favored one or more risk domains had an elevenfold increase in the likelihood of becoming persistent serious delinquents in adolescence, compared with children who had an overall balance of fewer risk domains and more protective domains.
There is a real risk that some children will become serious offenders. However, this danger is not general public knowledge and, consequently, is rarely addressed to prevent the development of serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offending.
Information about child delinquency is inadequate. Society does not have the information about child delinquents that is necessary to reduce this pervasive social problem. Such knowledge is crucial for planning services for child offenders at an early stage in their delinquency careers. Child delinquents need to be included in national, regional, and citywide surveys of offenders and victims to address important questions such as how common serious child delinquency is and whether serious child delinquents are qualitatively or quantitatively different from other child delinquents.
The Study Group noted the absence of annual surveys focusing on the prevalence of persistent disruptive children in elementary schools. In addition, there appears to be no consistent tracking of the number of referrals child welfare offices receive from police for children age 12 or younger who have committed delinquent acts. Annual police reports of juvenile delinquency are available. However, jurisdictional differences in the minimum age of criminal responsibility and possible differences in police practices for recording delinquent acts committed by children call into question the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the information collected on child delinquents. Policymakers need to step forward and insist on informing society, in a timely fashion, about the prevalence of child delinquents and their persistent disruptive behaviors; the proportion of such children who do or do not receive services for their problem behaviors; the number of risk factors for these children, who are routinely targeted for intervention; and the dissemination of effective and replicated interventions.
Child delinquents are expensive to taxpayers and society. Child delinquents tend to be expensive to society because of the numerous interventions they receive from different agencies, including special school services, child welfare and social services, mental health agencies, and family counseling services. Child delinquents are likely to receive services from the majority of agencies dealing with children. Although not all of these children are engaged by all of these services simultaneously, many of the young problematic children require the attention and intervention of a succession of several agencies.
Given the barriers that often exist between different agencies and their poor data sharing, it is highly likely that assessments are duplicated. Also, many practitioners complain about the lack of an integrated and coordinated approach among the agencies trying to deal with the multiple problems of child delinquents. Unintegrated services may be less effective than integrated services, especially when integrated services are well planned and evaluated.
Many child delinquents become chronic offenders (Blumstein, Farrington, and Moitra, 1985). As previously mentioned, the cost to society of a single criminal career ranges from $1.7 to $2.3 million in 1997 dollars (Cohen, 1998). Given that many of these high-rate offenders start their delinquent careers early in life, it is safe to assume that the cost to society of child delinquents is considerable.
Early intervention with child delinquents is essential. Currently, a whole array of effective interventions is available to reduce persistent disruptive child behavior and early-onset delinquency. Also, well-tested interventions exist to prevent delinquent juveniles from escalating to serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offending. However, for child delinquents known to the juvenile justice system, special programs, such as the previously mentioned ones in Toronto and Minneapolis (Howell, 2001), need to be further evaluated and tested in other jurisdictions.
Rather than intervening to prevent high-risk children from becoming tomorrow’s incarcerated offenders, policymakers tend to fund the more plentiful programs for older adolescent delinquents and programs that confine serious adolescent offenders in costly institutions. This is not to suggest that all the attention and funds should be given to child delinquents and that adolescent delinquents should be ignored. However, a more effective balance of resources should be developed so that the roots of serious adolescent delinquency can be better addressed in childhood.
Unfortunately, many policymakers are unaware of the efficacy and cost-effectiveness of alternative interventions and often choose not to fund early prevention methods that can benefit juveniles in general and taxpayers and citizens in particular. Yet no policymaker would argue that the optimal public health strategy to deal with nicotine addiction is the removal of cancerous lungs in large numbers of affected smokers. Instead, risk-based smoking prevention strategies have been developed and are now widely endorsed and implemented. The same rationale used for public health risks should be applied to preventing serious and violent juvenile delinquency. The focus should be on targeting early risk factors associated with child delinquency and persistent disruptive child behavior. In more and more communities, system professionals and policymakers realize that the increase in the number of child delinquents (and disruptive youth) is too large a problem to be ignored and that special programs are needed.
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