Unraveling Serious Juvenile Delinquency: Risk and needs assessment by classification into subgroups

In the Netherlands, the top 5% most serious juvenile off enders are placed in juvenile justice institutions under a mandatory treatment order. After two to six years of treatment, the chance of recidivism is supposed to have been reduced considerably. The new off enses that do take place, are supposed to be less severe in nature than the off enses that were committed before treatment. Over the years, several interventions aimed at these serious off enders have been developed. However, the eff ectiveness of most interventions has not been demonstrated yet. Specialists in the fi eld have said for years that improvement of interventions is needed. However, until now little research has been done on risk factors that predict recidivism in this group of very serious off enders. This is important because of the risk of this subgroup for society, for the victims and for the juveniles themselves. If more is known about the precursors of serious juvenile off ending and recidivism, existing interventions may be improved, new interventions may be developed and the eff ectiveness of interventions may be higher. However, the accuracy of current ways of predicting off ending and future recidivism is still far from perfect with eff ect sizes that are seldom higher than 0.70 (Hanson & Morton-Bourgon, 2009). Thus new ways to come to evidence-based decision making and the development of evidence-based interventions need to be explored.

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