U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
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Shay Bilchik, Administrator
October 1997 #68
Expert Panel Issues Report on
Serious and Violent Juvenile Offenders
Although serious and violent juvenile crime has become a major
contributor to rising rates of murder and other serious and violent
crimes across the country, information about this extraordinarily
important segment of juvenile crime has been scattered and not
systematically analyzed.
A ground-breaking report by a team of leading scholars now offers
a comprehensive assessment of research-based knowledge about
serious and violent juvenile offenders. It tells professionals across
the entire criminal and juvenile justice system what is known, what
programs have been tried, how well they have performed, and what
lessons policymakers and practitioners can draw from them.
The report is a product of the Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP’s) Study Group on Serious and
Violent Juvenile (SVJ) Offenders. The Study Group project was
created to provide information support for jurisdictions implement-
ing OJJDP’s Comprehensive Strategy for Serious, Violent, and
Chronic Juvenile Offenders. In order to disseminate key findings
and recommendations to the justice community, OJJDP will issue a
Research Summary of the report in the fall. The full report will be
commercially published in November 1997.
The report provides an authoritative discussion of issues sur-
rounding serious and violent juvenile offenders, a population that
poses the greatest challenge to policymakers at the State and local
levels. It integrates the concept of risk and protective factors with
information about intervention and prevention programs. Having
this knowledge available in one document will prove invaluable
to policymakers and legislators, judges, lawyers, law enforcement
personnel, academics, educators, social worke