Exploring Patterns of Offending by Juvenile Offenders in Australia: What Is the Evidence for a Specialist Violent Offender?

The question of whether there are offenders who specialise in violent offences is one that has been of considerable interest to life course developmental criminology as well as policy makers and the public. 

The current study investigated this using an administrative dataset of juvenile offenders from New South Wales, Australia. Specifically, it asked whether offenders convicted of a serious violent offence differed in their demographic, criminal history and reoffending profiles and whether there were further differences in these factors across gender and cultural identity. 

Overall, the findings indicated that violence is more likely to occur in the context of an extensive criminal career. Indigenous male individuals were the most frequent and chronic offenders in the sample. The policy and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Table 5

Descriptive statistics, ‘persistently’ violent offenders compared to non-violent offenders

	Non-violent (N = 1369)	Persistently violent offender (N = 69)	Pvalue	Effect size
Indigenous status	556 (40.6 %)	26 (37.7 %)	0.628	0.01
Gender (male)	1369 (86 %)	58 (84 %)	0.617	0.01
Age	16.46 (1.58)	16.49 (1.13)	0.450	<0.01
Socio-economic disadvantage	2.47 (1.00)	2.58 (1.16)	0.181	0.05
Remoteness index	2.02 (1.05)	1.54 (0.87)	0.001	0.19
Prior conviction	2.14 (1.83)	3.03 (2.86)	0.001	0.20
Age at first offence	15.13 (1.71)	14.88 (1.75)	0.112	0.06
Prior imprisonment	110 (8.0 %)	9 (13 %)	0.141	0.04
Prior suspended sentence	73 (5.30 %)	6 (8.7 %)	0.232	0.03
Prior breach offence	179 (13.1 %)	15 (21.7 %)	0.040	0.05
Prior juvenile offence	1245 (91 %)	69 (100 %)	0.009	0.07

For the categorical variables, differences were tested using Χ 2 and t tests were used to compare means of the continuous variables

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/k5YmZK

By:  Andrew McGrath 

 

More at:  https://twitter.com/hiv_insight

And: http://twitter.com/Prison_Health