Kimberly Kempf-Leonard

Continuity and Discontinuity in Criminal Careers

Introduction. Theoretical and Policy Considerations. Reviews of Related Research. Research Design and Methodology. The Prevalence of Adult Criminality. Predicting Adult Crime Status from Deliquency, Age, Frequency, and Court Dispositions. Predicting Adult Crime Status from Type of Deliquency. Predicting Adult Crime Status from the Severity of the Deliquency Career. Summary of Results. Implications for Theory and Policy. Index.

Minority Youths and Juvenile Justice Disproportionate Minority Contact After Nearly 20 Years of Reform Efforts

This article describes the current status of minority youths in juvenile justice systems. With nearly 20 years of federal support, there has been considerable research attention to identifying, explaining, and reducing the disproportionate minority contact with juvenile justice systems. Although progress is evident, the achievements of the Disproportionate Minority Contact (DMC) initiative have made it clear that the questions are more complicated than initially appeared. The answers do not appear in simple comparisons of youths by race but require “similarly situated” youths who differ only by minority status. Assuring that youths are similarly situated requires knowing their status on many complex and interrelated factors that exist across multiple levels of individuals, families, communities, and juvenile justice systems. The ways in which DMC can be reduced also require addressing parity in opportunities and expectations, both in the community and throughout juvenile justice systems.

Constructing Gangs: The Social Definition Of Youth Activities

Despite previous research, there remains no consensus on definitions of who is a gang member, what is a gang, and what is gang activity. This paper examines these issues based on results of a survey administered to two groups involved in responding to gangs—members of a gang task force and officers of an urban police department—and a group of juvenile detainees. Considerable differences are observed among the three groups in their appraisal of the extent and impact of gang activity, number of gangs and gang members, and gang-relatedness of five vignettes. The implications for formulating a policy response to gangs are discussed.

Gender Differences in Delinquency and Juvenile Justice Processing Evidence From National Data

This article traces the historical coverage of the gender issue in the criminological literature. It also provides contemporary empirical evidence about differences and similarities between girls and boys with respect to juvenile crime and to processing by the juvenile justice system, by analyzing several national juvenile crime data series, all of which have been recently updated. This research has produced numerous results that indicate that female and male delinquents possess more similarities than differences concerning arrest rates, arrest statistics, juvenile court data, and juvenile corrections data.

Serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders: The relationship of delinquency career types to adult criminality

We describe the intersections between serious, violent, and chronic juvenile offenders through 16 years in which the 1958 Philadelphia birth cohort was at risk for delinquency and young adult crime. Official records mark the offense careers from early onset as juveniles through age 26 for 27,160 persons. This large database is unique in its ability to support analysis of serious, violent, and chronic offending while controlling for differences based on race, gender, and neighborhood social status. The results show that belonging to certain delinquency subgroups or following certain “pathways” increases the likelihood of being arrested in adulthood. Although prevalence differed, general findings were consistent across demographic criteria. We demonstrate the importance, to developmental criminology, of linking juvenile delinquency career types to adult criminality for policy formulation and theory development.

Disparity based on sex: Is gender-specific treatment warranted?

This paper addresses gender-specific treatment in juvenile justice processing, an important topic in view of new funding opportunities to develop female-specific programs. This topic is controversial and includes many unresolved issues. To provide context, we relate this study to lessons from the initiative to address disproportionate minority confinement: that it is impossible to understand confinement without understanding the process by which youths are confined, that structural and demographic traits facilitate the process, and that benevolent interventions can have unintended negative consequences. We present empirical findings that juvenile justice cases are “gendered,” but that court treatment of those cases shows more gender similarities than differences. In contrast, interviews with officials suggest large gender gaps in opportunities for services, and indicate some gender biases. Bias and disparity also are themes among delinquent and “at-risk” girls who participated in focus groups; in addition, girls expressed preferences for treatment comparable to that given to boys. Finally, we evaluate what has been advocated as female-specific programming and recommend how best to proceed.

Have Federal Sentencing Guidelines Reduced Severity? An Examination of One Circuit

Congress intended to make the sentencing process less discretionary and more equitable for similarly situated defendants when it passed the U.S. Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. Sentencing guidelines were devised to promote these changes. After more than a decade of implementation, however, little is known about the impact of the new policy. This paper examines sentences given between 1993 and 1994 in one federal circuit in an effort to determine whether this policy instrument has achieved success. The theoretical model of a rational case processing system (Gottfredson and Gottfredson, 1980) is used to guide the interpretation of our findings and the recommendations we offer for improvements.

The questionable advantage of defense counsel in juvenile court

This article examines the issue of legal representation in serious juvenile delinquency matters in three diverse juvenile courts. The prevalence of legal counsel varied among felony referrals. Out-of-home placement was more likely to occur if a youth had an attorney, even when other relevant legal and individual factors were the same. Within each court, the results showed more likely of placement corresponding to seriousness of the case. Although this escalation was evident among cases with attorneys and those without, placement was more apt to occur when there was legal counsel. Given these findings, we offer recommendations for issues that should be considered and possible policy actions.

Mexican Immigration: Insiders’ Views on Crime, Risks, and Victimization

This study is a qualitative examination of interview data with recent Mexican immigrants about their experiences coming to the United States and adjusting to their new life to determine the extent to which crime has been involved. The perception that Mexican immigrants are responsible for new predatory crimes is explored, along with other crime-related issues of offending, risks, and vulnerabilities. The data were collected with a semistructured interview schedule and administered to 30 participants chosen via a chain-referral process in 2 cities in 2 states with the largest concentrations of Mexicans living in the United States. The findings have implications for understanding vulnerabilities and at-risk situations of Mexican immigrants living in the United States, using social exclusion theory. The results also may prove useful for immigration policy design and development to create comprehensive, inclusive measures for immigrants to the United States.

Implications for Theory and Policy

The criminal history data used in this study do not offer a wide array of theoretically relevant variables, so our research cannot be used to explain why some youths begin their offending careers in the first place. We readily accept the characterization and the implied criticism offered by Sampson and Laub that, although the 1958 cohort study “has provided key information on criminal offending and has served as a stimulus for research, explanatory characteristics were limited largely to structural and demographic variables (such as poverty and race)” (1993: 23). We are not apologetic about this aspect of the data; rather, we hope we have adopted a realistic position about their strengths and weaknesses.