3-017 - Youth at the Nexus of Juvenile Justice and Education

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Both the juvenile justice system and the education system are designed to serve the needs of youth. In recent years, these two systems have become increasingly linked. Contact with the juvenile justice system is associated with academic underachievement and dropout (Wang and Fredricks, 2014). Furthermore, under current school discipline policies, rule-breaking may result in a youth’s arrest (Mallett, 2016). This symposium will present cutting-edge research resulting from collaborations among authors in public health, economics, psychology, criminology, and social work from within and outside the U.S. Three presentations will discuss the interplay between school systems and the juvenile justice system, with an eye toward implications for intervention. The first paper is a longitudinal comparison of the effect of parental monitoring and teacher monitoring on reoffending among juvenile offenders, and finds that leveraging teachers as monitoring agents reduces delinquency. Using structural equation modeling, the second paper examines the mediating role of school bonding and suspensions on the relation between juvenile offending and state test scores. The third paper links nine longitudinal administrative datasets from education agencies, the child welfare system, the juvenile justice system, and the county attorney’s office to evaluate the effect of a truancy diversion program on attendance, dropout, on-time school completion, and involvement in the juvenile justice system. A discussant will integrate the presentations from the perspective of adolescent development and the school-to-prison pipeline. The implications emerging from this body of research for practitioners in schools and the juvenile justice system will be discussed.

Sub Unit

• School / Educational Context

Chair

• Caitlin Cavanagh, Michigan State University

Discussant

• Maureen Allwood, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Individual Presentations

• Reducing Delinquency through Monitoring Justice-System-Involved Male Adolescents: Whose Monitoring Matters? - Presenting Author: Adam Fine, UC Irvine; Paul Frick, Louisiana State University; Laurence Steinberg, Temple University; Elizabeth Cauffman, UC Irvine

• Juvenile Offending, School Attitudes, and State Test Scores - Presenting Author: Caitlin Cavanagh, Michigan State University; Alissa Mahler, UC Irvine; Elizabeth Cauffman, UC Irvine

• “Absent again?” Evaluation of a truancy diversion program using matched sampling - Presenting Author: Clea McNeely, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Won Lee, University of Minnesota; Besufekad Alemu, University of Minnesota; Janet Rosenbaum, SUNY Downstate Medical Center; Lynette Michelle Renner, University of Minnesota