Juvenile Delinquency Prevention, assessment, and intervention

Juvenile offending and anti-social behaviour are enormous societal concerns. This broad-reaching volume summarizes the current evidence on prevention, diversion, causes, and rates of delinquency, as well as assessment of risk and intervention needs. A distinguished cast of contributors from law, psychology, and psychiatry describe what we know about interventions in school, community, and residential contexts, focusing particularly on interventions that are risk reducing and cost effective. Equally important, each chapter comments on what is not well supported through research, distinguishing aspects of current practice that are likely to be effective from those that are not and mapping new directions for research, policy, and practice. Finally, the volume provides a description of a model curriculum for training legal and mental health professionals on conducting relevant assessments of adolescents for the courts. Effectively bridging research and practice, this will be an important resource for legal and mental health professionals involved in the juvenile justice system, policy makers seeking humane but effective interventions in the context of society's need for safety, and those involved in teaching about and training in juvenile delinquency.

1: Introduction, 2: Risk Factors, Protective Factors and the Prevention of Antisocial Behaviour Among Juveniles, 3: School Violence: Fears Versus Facts, 4: Juvenile Offending, 5: Mental Health Disorders: The Neglected Risk Factor in Juvenile Delinquency, 6: Risk Factors and Intervention Outcomes: Meta-Analyses of Juvenile Offending, 7: Mental Health and Rehabilitative Services in Juvenile Justice: System Reforms and Innovative Approaches, 8: Juvenile Diversion, 9: Juveniles' Competence to Confess and Competence to Participate in the Juvenile Justic Process, 10: Risk Assessment in Juvenile Justice Policy and Practice, 11: Adjudicatory and Dispositional Decision Making in Juvenile Justice, 12: Community-Based Treatments, 13: Mental Health Treatment for Juvenile Offenders in Residential Psychiatric and Juvenile Justice Settings, 14: Training Mental Health and Juvenile Justice Professionals in Juvenile Forensic Assessment, 15: Emerging Directions: Implications for Research, Policy and Practice

Psychologists, psychiatrists, lawyers, social workers, and judges within the juvenile justice system, graduate students, law students, advanced undergraduates, forensic psychology and child/adolescent psychiatry fellows