The Relationship between Social Distance and Treatment Attrition for Juvenile Offenders

ABSTRACT:

Although recent work has begun to identify factors associated with risk of treatment attrition for juvenile offenders, few of these studies have considered how community context is related to the completion of juvenile offender treatment. The current work examines the relationship between social distance and treatment attrition for juvenile offenders. Analyzing a data set of 5,517 juvenile offenders adjudicated in Philadelphia, the results of cross-classified hierarchical models indicate that social distance, operationalized in two ways that consider perceptions of both the ethnic composition and level of disadvantage within neighborhoods, does not directly predict the likelihood of treatment attrition. However, when considered with the ethnicity of the juvenile offenders in the form of an interaction effect, social distance based on perceptions of ethnicity within neighborhoods is shown to predict the likelihood of treatment attrition, and to be more acute for young non-White offenders. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Notes

These boundaries were created to represent distinct neighborhoods by city planners and researchers to construct more accurate spatial units in Philadelphia, compared to politically drawn boundaries, such as zip codes or census tracts.

Juvenile offenders with and without treatment completion data were compared by running chi square tests that determined whether the cases that contain treatment completion data differed from those that do not, on demographics such as age, race, and gender. Results of these tests indicated that no significant differences on those demographic variables exist between those who do and do not have treatment completion information. As a result, the removal of the 731 young offenders without treatment completion data should not create a biased population.

The mean annual client population for these seven programs from 1996 through 2004 was 8.14.

For a description of the weighting process, see Garcia, Taylor, and Lawton ().

Data were not provided by the PPD for rape offenses.

For a description of the neighborhood disadvantage scale, see the Control Variables section.

The Cronbach’s alpha for this item using 2000 data is 0.947, is 0.871 with 2002 data, and is 0.845 during the 2004 administration of the survey.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Lockwood

Brian Lockwood is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ. He received his PhD in Criminal Justice from Temple University in 2010. His research interests include the community-level correlates of crime and delinquency and the influence of facilities on crime. His recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, the Security Journal, and the Journal of Juvenile Justice.

Elizabeth R. Groff

Elizabeth R. Groff (PhD in Geography, 2006, University of Maryland) is an Associate Professor in the Criminal Justice Department at Temple University. As an applied researcher she was GIS Coordinator at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department and a former Director of the National Institute of Justice’s Crime Mapping Research Center. Her research interests include place-based criminology, modeling geographical influences on human activity, the role of technology in police organizations, and the development of innovative methodologies using geographic information systems, agent-based simulation models, and randomized experiments. She was elected a fellow of the Academy of Experimental Criminology in 2010.

George F. Rengert

George F. Rengert is Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at Temple University. He holds an MA from the Ohio State University and a PhD from the University of North Carolina. A geographer by training, he is one of the early contributors to the modern field of spatial analysis in criminology. Dr. Rengert is the author or editor of nine books and more than 100 scientific articles and papers dealing with such diverse topics as the location of illegal drug markets, spatial justice, and barriers to the spatial movement of criminals. His current research interests center on the application of geographic information systems to the analysis of urban crime patterns.

Heidi E. Grunwald

Heidi E. Grunwald is the Deputy Director for the Public Health Law Research Program, a National Program Officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation housed at Temple University’s Beasley School of Law. Heidi is also currently the Managing Director of the Institute for Survey Research at Temple University. She is a partner in a recent spin-out company, Legal Science Partners LLC, which holds the intellectual property for LawAtlas.org, a policy surveillance portal intended to facilitate research on the empirical effects of laws on health. Interests include scientific methods for quantitative coding of legal texts, the use of cross-classified hierarchical linear and propensity score models to examine quasi-experimental data on juvenile recidivism, and youth functional assessment scales. She holds a BA degree in mathematics, MA in mathematics education, MS in statistics, and a PhD from the University of Michigan in Higher Education Administration, Research, Evaluation and Assessment.