Assessing the conduct of juveniles: diagnosis and delinquency, 1900–2013

American child psychiatrists have long been interested in the problems of delinquent behaviour by juveniles. With the rise of specific psychiatric diagnoses in the 1960s and 1970s, delinquent behaviour was defined within the diagnosis of conduct disorder. Like all psychiatric diagnoses, this concept was shaped by particular historical actors in context and has been highly contingent on assumptions related to race, class and gender. The history of conduct disorder illustrates the tensions in child psychiatry between the expansive goals of the field and the often limited uses of its professional authority, as well as individual children as the target of intervention and their interactions in groups.

Race, Poverty, and U.S. Children’s Exposure to Neighborhood Incarceration

Recent research has documented negative associations between children’s welfare and mobility and their exposure to neighborhood incarceration. But inequality in such exposure among children in the United States is poorly understood. This study links tract-level census data to administrative data on prison admissions to measure 37.8 million children’s exposure to neighborhood incarceration in 2008, by race/ethnicity and poverty status. The average poor Black or African American child lived in a neighborhood where 1 in 174 working-age adults was admitted to prison annually, more than twice the rate of neighborhood prison admission experienced by the average U.S. child. Residential segregation and the spatial concentration of incarceration combine to create significant ethnoracial and economic inequality in the neighborhood experiences of U.S. children.