Risk Factors for Youth Offending and Recidivism

This chapter reviews knowledge about risk factors for juvenile delinquency and juvenile recidivism. In understanding “how and why individuals exceed normative levels of offending, in terms of the frequency and types of crimes committed, between the expected beginning in childhood and the expected ending during middle adulthood” (Basto-Pereira M, Farrington DP. Br J Criminol 60(2):299. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azz037 , 2020), the identification of risk factors for offending and later recidivism yields results relevant to derive implications for prevention in criminology. For example, youth who have delinquent peers are considerably more likely to be involved in criminal acts and reoffend. Recent evidence showed that being associated with delinquent friends was an important independent predictor in convictions in adulthood whereas the youths who desisted from crime were more likely to have stopped going around in a group of delinquent friends (Farrington DP, Piquero AR, Jennings WG, Jolliffe D. Offending from childhood to late middle age: Recent results from the Cambridge study in delinquent development, 2nd edn. Springer, New York, 2023). The present chapter presents a brief review of previous research on risk factors for juvenile recidivism, which is rather scarce up to now in Argentina and also internationally, particularly because most previous research has investigated the risk factors for delinquency not for recidivism. Additionally, this chapter provides original evidence by examining the presence of the most important risk factors for recidivism found in young offenders in Argentina, which are explained within the framework of the specific cultural context of Argentina.