Violent Youth in Juvenile and Adult Court: An Assessment of Sentencing Strategies in Texas
This paper examines the effectiveness of two sentencing strategies for managing serious and violent juvenile offenders: judicial waiver to adult court and determinate sentencing in juvenile court. Corrections data were analyzed and it was found that both groups consistently receive longer terms of incarceration than are available through normal juvenile justice processing. However, this finding changed when actual time served was taken into consideration. A discriminant analysis showed that juveniles determin-ately sentenced in juvenile court are more likely to be younger and receive and serve shorter sentences than juveniles waived to adult court and sentenced to prison.
Evaluation Issues Confronting Juvenile Justice Sentencing Reforms: A Case Study of Texas
Many states currently are implementing “get tough” sentencing reforms in juvenile justice. Surprisingly, however, little attention has been given to evaluation issues identified by the adult justice sentencing literature as critical to assessments of efficacy. Analysis of one recent juvenile justice sentencing reform in Texas—determinate sentencing—provides an opportunity to highlight such issues and to demonstrate their relevance to assessment of other states' juvenile justice sentencing reforms. This article identifies the failure to attend adequately to design, implementation, use, and assessment issues, including identification of potential unintended effects, as barriers to effective evaluation of these reforms.
The Categorical Stability of Gambling Motives Among Community-Recruited Gamblers: A Longitudinal Assessment
Over the past decade, several motivational models have been proposed to explain the role of motives in gambling disorder. In the model captured by the four-factor Gambling Motives Questionnaire Financial (GMQ-F), gamblers are described as being primarily motivated to gamble for ‘coping’, ‘enhancement’, ‘social’, and ‘financial’ reasons. Although this model has received significant empirical support; to date, research assessing the role of motives in gambling disorder has been primarily cross-sectional in nature. Thus, the extent to which gambling motives remain stable over time has yet to be explored. In the current study, the stability versus fluidity of self-assessed gambling motives was investigated using the Quinte Longitudinal Study, a longitudinal dataset of gambling behaviour collected over 5 years. Gambling motives of 2795 gamblers were examined over all five annual assessments. The total proportion of gamblers who stayed in the same primary motive category across each of the 5 consecutive assessments was 22%, indicating substantial fluidity in category membership. Substantial movement between categories was seen for each GMQ-F group, as well as an additional group of non-classified motives. Logistic regression analyses suggest that greater resistance to gambling fallacies significantly predicted stability between the baseline assessment and a follow-up 1 year later, but gambling severity did not. Potential limitations in the study design and opportunities for future research are discussed.