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Age is the strongest predictor of delinquent behavior. For nearly every type of delinquency, involvement is rather low in childhood or early adolescence, increasing steadily with age until reaching a peak in late adolescence. Although the exact rate of increased involvement and peak age of involvement varies across offense types (property crime peaks at about age 16 and violent delinquency peaks at age 18), this general pattern of increased delinquency with age occurs in both arrest rates and self-report studies. An important related concept is age-at-onset. The age at which youth first engage in delinquent behavior is a strong predictor of the seriousness and intensity of subsequent delinquent and criminal behavior. For example, a young age at first arrest (under 14) is strongly predictive of serious, repeat delinquency and continuing criminal behavior into adulthood. Similarly, early first use of the so-called gateway drugs--tobacco, alcohol, and marijuana-- strongly correlates with serious drug or alcohol dependency in adolescence or adulthood.

Next to age, gender is the best predictor of delinquent behavior. Boys are more likely than girls to engage in nearly every form of delinquency and are more pronounced in official arrest statistics. For violent index crimes (homicide, aggravated assault, robbery, and forcible rape), UCR data from 2005 indicate that male juvenile arrests exceeded female juvenile arrests by a ratio of 4 to 1. For serious property crimes, the male-to-female arrest ratio in 2005 was nearly 2 to 1, and the 2005 ratio of male-to-female drug abuse violation arrests was nearly 5 to 1. Some less-serious offense types show greater gender equality. For instance, boys are only slightly more likely than girls to be arrested for larceny-theft. Self-report studies also indicate boys are more delinquent than girls, but the sex differences in most self-report studies are smaller than the arrest data would suggest. This discrepancy between self-report and official arrest statistics may occur because girls' delinquency is less often observed by, or reported to, police or because law enforcement officials exercise discretion in arrest decisions to the favor of girls. This hypothesis has been termed the chivalry thesis.

Race/ethnicity is another characteristic for which official arrest data and self-reports provide discrepant findings. In the United States, white youth have lower arrest rates than black youth. Asian American youth have the lowest arrest rates, whereas rates for American Indian youth are higher for some offenses (e.g., homicide) but lower for other offenses (e.g., drug abuse and weapon law violations). Black youth are more than twice as likely as white youth to be arrested for both violent index crimes and property index crimes. In self-report studies of commonly occurring delinquency such as status offenses and marijuana use, however, white youth tend to report greater involvement in delinquency than black youth. The greater arrest rates of minority youth may result, in part, from heavier police activity in predominantly minority neighborhoods, yet studies in which researchers ride along with police and record their interactions with youth generally do not find racial bias in police officers' use of discretion in arrest decisions.

Many studies indicate that youth in juvenile detention and correctional facilities are more likely than youth in the general population to come from lowincome families. Self-report studies of delinquency, however, do not consistently find greater delinquency among low-income youth. Youth from families with lower socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to report serious violent offenses, but higher SES youth are more likely to report some common forms of delinquency such as alcohol and marijuana use. For most forms of delinquency, self-report studies find no SES differences.

References:

1) Agnew, Robert. 2004. Juvenile Delinquency: Causes and Control. Los Angeles: Roxbury.

2) Snyder, Howard N. and Melissa Sickmund. 2006. Juvenile Offenders and Victims: 2006 National Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention.

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