Understanding Risks and Protective Factors to Promote Health in Justice-Involved Youth

Dear Colleagues,

Justice-involved youth and youth subject to justice involvement experience myriad mental health concerns and run the risk of developing chronic health conditions and acute injuries, such as traumatic brain injuries. Moreover, these youth are exposed to multiple environmental and psychosocial stressors (child maltreatment, parental incarceration, community violence, etc.). The way in which these risks interact to contribute to the onset, trajectory, and persistence of delinquency remains opaque. Importantly, not all youth facing these risks will engage in delinquency and many justice-involved youth will not become adult offenders. Nonetheless, our knowledge of protective factors promoting resilience and leading to positive mental, and especially physical, health outcomes among these youth is rudimentary. This Special Issue seeks contributions that attempt to elucidate pathways contributing to mental and physical health risk (e.g., health disparities) and protective factors (e.g., resilience) among justice-involved youth. We are interested in these relations at any level (e.g., biological, personality, psychosocial, familial, community / neighborhood, sociological, and policy). All contributions examining health among justice-involved youth and the processes through which risk and protective factors exert their impacts will be considered; however, we are particularly interested in papers that take a mechanistic (e.g., biological, psychosocial, or community/policy) perspective, manuscripts that investigate pathways (e.g., longitudinal analyses or moderation / mediation designs), and studies that use experimental or quasi-experimental approaches to better understand these issues.

Dr. Adam T. Schmidt
Dr. April G. Thomas
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• justice-involved youth
• juvenile delinquency
• juvenile justice
• resilience
• health disparities
• chronic health conditions
• protective factors
• developmental psychopathology
• developmental neuroscience
• child psychology
• forensic psychology
• developmental mechanisms