Citation

Sankey M, Huon GF. Leg. Crim. Psychol. 1999; 4(2): 253-264.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1999, British Psychological Society, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1348/135532599167888

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Purpose. Crime statistics reveal that only a small minority of juveniles engage in serious delinquent behaviour. Yet scoring procedures in self-report measures of delinquency do not differentiate between serious and non-serious offenders. Rather, their total scores obscure such qualitative differences This study revisits the notion of classifying individuals as more or less serious offenders and argues that such a classification system should be included in studies of juvenile delinquency.Method. Scores on the Self-Reported Delinquency Scale (Mak, 1993) were obtained from 131 adolescents (72 females and 59 males). Seriousness judgments for each of the items on Mak's scale were obtained from 13 police officers, 14 teachers, 12 lawyers and 15 psychology students. Those judgments were used to derive seriousness scores for each adolescent participant, and several strategies were evaluated for distinguishing serious from non-serious offending.Results. The results show that the raters judged different categories of offences to be differentially serious, with crimes against the person being judged as most serious. Incorporating only the 'most serious' offences was identified as more useful than employing the range of offences in order to distinguish serious from non-serious offenders.Conclusions. Acknowledging the difficulties involved in choosing an optimal classification system, it is proposed that self-report measures for juvenile crime or delinquency ought to incorporate an index for distinguishing serious from non-serious offenders. Distinguishing levels of offending seriousness could prove useful for identifying those adolescents who are most at-risk for continuing involvement in crime.

Language: en