Violence Exposure, Continuous Trauma, and Repeat Offending in Female and Male Serious Adolescent Offenders, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania and Maricopa County, Arizona, 2000-2010

A major goal of juvenile justice reform is to reduce reoffending and recidivism among juvenile offenders. Advocates of trauma informed practices assert that disproportionately high rates of violence exposure and trauma symptoms exacerbate the delinquent and violent behavior of juvenile offenders, but there is little evidence of the role of trauma in reoffending, particularly for the group of juvenile offenders that are at the highest risk for reoffending: serious offenders. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to conduct secondary data analysis on data from the Pathways to Desistance Study (Mulvey et al., 2004) to enhance understanding of how continuous trauma exposure and related symptoms impact reoffending in serious juvenile offenders. This study utilized secondary data analysis on six annual waves of data from the Pathways to Desistance study (Mulvey et al., 2004), a large multi-site, longitudinal study of adolescents who had committed a serious criminal offense. The study followed juvenile offenders into adulthood. The current study analyzed youth self-report of demographic variables, community violence exposure, trauma-related symptoms, and violent offending, as well as official records of youth offending. Regression analysis, latent transition analysis, and survival analysis were used to examine the research questions and hypotheses. Results showed that the majority of participants experienced continuous violence exposure as witnesses to community violence, with lower rates for victimization. Further, violence exposure and trauma-related symptoms (anxiety and hostility) co-occurred over time. Also, continuous violence exposure during adolescence predicted self-reported violent reoffending in early adulthood, even after controlling for demographic factors. Victimization significantly increased the risk for re-arrest. Further, this risk of re-offending was higher for male offenders than for female offenders. Finally, callous-unemotional traits and hostility mediated the relationship between continuous violence exposure and later violent offending. In this study, data from the Pathways to Desistance study were analyzed using SPSS and Mplus software packages, and the syntax files used to analyze the data have been included. The Pathways to Desistance study datasets are archived at the University of Michigan Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), and the PI obtained the Pathways data from ICPSR.

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