TAKE-HOME MESSAGE FOR PRACTITIONERS:
JJ-involved girls with histories of sexual victimization may be perceived as more aggressive depending on who conducts the assessment; trauma-informed training could help prevent defensive, trauma-related behaviors from being misclassified as criminogenic risk.

TAKE-HOME MESSAGE FOR RESEARCHERS: juvenile risk assessments can reflect assessor bias; officer characteristics (like gender) may alter how trauma-exposed girls are evaluated in the justice system.

Male POs (but not female POs) rated sexually victimized girls as having more serious personality risks than girls without victimization histories. The effect was marginal because of power issues (few victimized girls were supervised by male officers) but consistent.

Using official records, we examined how probation officers scored girls on the “personality” domain of the YLS juvenile risk assessment (e.g., impulsivity, aggression, lack of remorse). Sexually victimized girls were NOT rated as having worse personality problems once accounting for other risks.

Also, follow me on Goodreads for some “legendary reviews”*

*journal editors, note that my reviewer skills do not extend outside leisure reading 😉

What this means for practitioners (*cough, cough* law makers and enforcers at all levels): Alienating immigrants from the justice system via draconian local immigration enforcement may have the unintended consequence of reduced public safety and inequitable access to resources.

What this means for academics: General and specific attitudes toward legal actors may be informed by distinct experiences and should be considered separately. Immigrants may see police, not judges, as the “face” of the law, so legal actors should also be considered separately.

Attitudes toward judges were neither associated with documentation status nor family deportations, suggesting that the association is unique to police during an era when police are increasingly involved in immigration enforcement.

Undocumented women had negative SPECIFIC attitudes toward police (i.e., stemming from their experience with police), while undocumented women who had experienced family deportations had negative GENERAL attitudes toward police (i.e., considering the police as an abstract group).

I’m very proud of Dr. LaBerge and we will all miss her in the lab. Can’t wait to cheer her on as her career develops!

Her dissertation examines the predictive validity of a commonly used juvenile risk assessment tool for dual-system youth. As with all her work, it was rigorous (collecting/cleaning the data took months, let alone all the new analyses she self-taught for post-doc robustness checks) and actionable!

Alyssa is a natural leader and a hard worker. Although this early bird will never understand her night owl ways, she has been incredibly productive, balancing many publications, community-engaged research, and a passion for teaching so strong that she earned a fellowship to train others in pedagogy!