Research and data on youth and delinquency is critical for identifying opportunities and developing strategies to support positive development through prevention and intervention. Responses to youth misbehavior by youth-serving systems — including education, child welfare, behavioral health, and justice systems can play an important role in promoting or disrupting youths’ healthy social and emotional development. The five findings below provide insights into the nature, scope, and context of youth and delinquency.
1. Youth risk-taking is part of the normative developmental process with brain maturation continuing into early adulthood.
The cognitive control capacities needed to inhibit risk taking behaviors develop throughout adolescence from the onset of puberty through the mid-20s. Exploration and risk taking are part of the natural developmental process during this period. Research suggests environmental factors can affect youths’ development and impact risk trajectories. Exposure to positive factors, such as supportive relationships and positive role models, is associated with positive developmental trajectories. Exposure to negative factors, such as toxic stress caused by abuse and neglect, can reduce youths’ control of their moods and impulses and put or keep them on at-risk trajectories.
2. Engagement in offending tends to increase through adolescence and then decline.
Research has consistently found the prevalence of offending increases during adolescence and subsequently declines, with most people eventually desisting from criminal behavior altogether.For example, as illustrated in Exhibit 1, data from 2020 on age-specific rates shows arrests for violent offenses increased from ages 10 to 22, stabilized from ages 23 to 29, and then declined.4 Reduced offending behaviors happen for most youths regardless of formal intervention. Research also suggests formal punishments, including incarceration, may disrupt youths’ psychosocial development and increase the risk of reoffending, dropping out of school, and involvement in the criminal justice system.
3. Only a small percentage of youths are arrested for any crime even fewer for violent crime.
Less than 1% of youths ages 0 to 17 were arrested for any offense in 2022, and less than a half of 1% were arrested for a violent offense.6 Research has identified protective factors individual, family, peer, school, and community that can decrease the likelihood of youths engaging in delinquent behaviors. These factors may protect youths directly regardless of other factors or indirectly by reducing the negative effects of adverse experiences. Interventions can increase the presence and influence of protective factors and may prevent the onset or continuation of delinquent behaviors. For example, Early Developmental Prevention Programs for At-Risk Youths which focus on enhancing child, parent-child, or family well-being are rated effective by CrimeSolutions at reducing future deviance and criminal justice involvement. For youths who have engaged in delinquent behaviors, justice-system interventions that are based on a therapeutic intervention philosophy (e.g., counseling, skills building), focus on high-risk youths, and have high-quality implementation can be effective at reducing recidivism across all levels of system penetration. For example, Multisystemic Therapy which is a family- and community based treatment program targeting youths between the ages of 12 and 17 who present with serious antisocial and problem behavior and with serious criminal offenses was rated effective by Crime Solutions for reducing the number of rearrests and the number of days youths were incarcerated.