Current Newsletter

Executive Board

Chair	Bianca Bersani
Vice Chair	Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo
Secretary/Treasurer	Megan Bears Augustyn
Student Representatives	Gabriel Alvarez Carol Stoffel
Executive Counselors Program Chair	Raquel V. Oliveira
Awards and Elections Chair	Kelsey Cundiff
Membership Chair	Elias Nader

Editorial and Media Team

Newsletter Editor	Sarah Banks
Social Media	Vacant – please volunteer!

Committees

Program Committee

Committee Members

Abigail Novak; Rachel Novick; Dena Carson; Klaus Boers; Elaine Eggleston Doherty; Dylan Jackson; Janani Umamaheswar; Bianca Bersani

Awards Committees

Lifetime Achievement Awards Committee	Audrey Hickert (chair); Emily Gray; Terrie Moffitt; Robert Sampson; Brandon Welsh
General Awards Committee	Rachel Novick (chair); Bridget Joyner-Carpanini; Megan Kang; Roland Neil; Ugur Orak; Damon Petrich; Sandra Stone

Contact details: dlccrim.org/officers-and-committees

As we begin another academic year and look ahead to the 2026 Annual Meeting in Chicago, I am pleased to welcome you to the fall edition of the Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology newsletter. First, I want to recognize and thank the colleagues who worked diligently to bring this latest issue together: Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo, Sarah Banks, and Sarah Silberman. The strength of our newsletter depends on the willingness of members to share their work, ideas, accomplishments, and opportunities with the broader Division community. This issue includes a preview of our ASC2026 panels and a Research Corner highlighting new work on criminal legal system contact and youth mental health, offering another snapshot of the scholarship, people, and activities that make DLC such a vibrant community.

Our Division continues to thrive. As of September 1, we have 237 members, representing continued growth of the division. This growth reflects not only the continued engagement of our long-serving members, whose commitment has helped build and sustain the Division, but also the increasing participation of 42 continuing student members and 33 new student members.

This expanding community brings new perspectives, questions, and energy to developmental and life‑course criminology. It is particularly encouraging to see students and early-career scholars becoming increasingly engaged in the Division and contributing to its intellectual life. At the same time, the continued involvement of our more established members provides an important foundation for mentorship, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas across generations of scholars.

Looking Ahead to Chicago: We are excited to see everyone at the upcoming Annual Meeting, where the DLC will host 16 panel presentations, including two Emerging Scholar sessions. The Emerging Scholar sessions provide an important opportunity to showcase the work of scholars at the beginning of their careers and to create space for the broader Division community to welcome and help develop their ideas.

This year’s program also offers an especially meaningful opportunity to consider the connections between developmental and life-course research and the world beyond academia. Building on the President’s theme for the Annual Meeting – Criminology and Justice Policy – I invite you to attend two panels that challenge us to think about how findings from DLC research can/should inform policy and practice. Our field has much to contribute to conversations about how institutions, policies, and interventions can respond to the ways that lives unfold and change over time. I look forward to the conversations these panels generate and to hearing how colleagues across the Division are thinking about the translation of our research into policy and practice.

We also hope the full DLC community will join us for several opportunities to gather together during the Annual Meeting, including our Annual Business Meeting, Awards Ceremony, and Division Social.

Annual Business Meeting: Nov 19th, 12:30pm, [Salon 2 – 3rd Floor]

Our Annual Business Meeting provides an important opportunity to take stock of the health of the Division, identify opportunities for continued growth, and recognize the commitment of those who serve on our Executive Board and contribute to the Division in so many other ways. I encourage all members to attend and participate in the conversation about where we want the Division to go next.

Celebrating Our Community: Nov 19th, 2:00pm, [Salon 2 – 3rd Floor]

We also hope you will join us for the annual David P. Farrington Lecture, delivered this year by our Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, Dr. Stephen Farrall, entitled “Has Criminal Careers Research and Developmental & Life-Course Criminology Missed a Crucial Variable?”

Prior to the lecture, we will recognize this year’s award recipients. Please join us in congratulating this year’s other recipients:

Guy Skinner — Early Career Scholar Award

Per-Olof Wikström, Kyle Treiber & Gabriela Roman — Outstanding Contribution Award

Alyssa Talaugon — Outstanding Student Contribution Award

Thaís Moreira de Andrade — Outstanding Student Paper Award

Finally, I want to express my sincere appreciation to our Executive Board for their continued support, service, and commitment to the Division. Maria Tcherni-Buzzeo (Vice Chair), Megan Bears Augustyn (Secretary/Treasurer), Raquel V. Oliveira (Program Chair), Kelsey Cundiff (Awards and Elections Chair), Elias Nader (Membership Chair), and Gabriel Alvarez and Carol Stoffel (Student Representatives). The growth and vigor of DLC are a reflection of their dedication to the field and their willingness to invest their time and energy in strengthening our professional community.

As we look toward the year ahead, I also welcome ideas and engagement from the broader Division. Whether through new programming, collaborations, mentoring opportunities, connections with policy and practice, or efforts to expand the reach and relevance of developmental and life-course criminology, there are many possibilities before us. I hope you will continue to share your ideas and find ways to be involved.

We look forward to seeing you in Chicago!

Warmly,
Bianca Bersani
Chair, Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology

DLC-sponsored and co-sponsored sessions and events at the 2026 ASC Annual Meeting.

Wednesday, November 18

8:00–9:20 a.m.
Stacked Risks of Juvenile Life Without Parole (JLWOP): Childhood Systems Involvement, Adult Health, and Reentry Concerns
Salon 12, 3rd Floor
Papers A Deep Dive into the Health and Wellbeing of Incarcerated Adults Serving JLWOP Sentences  |  Unpacking Systems Involvement in Childhood and Mental Health in Adulthood Among Incarcerated Persons Service JLWOP  |  How Health Shapes Reentry Concerns Among Incarcerated Adults Serving JLWOP Sentences

9:30–10:50 a.m.
Causes and Consequences of Adolescent Delinquency
Salon 2, 3rd Floor
Papers The Subjective Experience of Childhood Disadvantage as a Predictor of Adolescent Delinquency and Low Self-Control  |  The Company You Keep: The Influence of Popular Delinquents and Deviant Brokers on an Individual’s Offending Trajectories  |  Adolescent Police Contact and the Transition to Adulthood  |  In Search of Factors That Promote Desistance Among Juvenile Offenders: Considering the Role of Prosocial Community Ties  |  Evaluating the Causal Impacts of Raise the Age (RTA) in Michigan

11:00 a.m.–12:20 p.m.
Lightning Talk: Emerging Scholars in Life-Course Criminology Lightning Talk
Crystal Room, 3rd Floor
Papers Multi-Measure Analyses of Self-Control: Assessing Relative Stability and Predictive Validity  |  From Disruption to Development: A Biopsychosocial Framework for Early Externalizing Behavior in Childhood Contexts  |  I Am the Change: The Role of Psychological Capital in Drug-Using Offenders  |  Structural Turning Points, Fatalistic Beliefs, and Desistance: An Intersectional Approach  |  Understanding Gender and Its Role in the Transition to Adulthood for Justice-Involved Young Adults

12:30–1:50 p.m.
Causal Methods in Developmental and Life-Course Criminology: Strategies to Improve Causal Inference
Salon 2, 3rd Floor
Papers Procedural Justice and Aggression in Serious Juvenile Offenders: The Moderating Role of Callous–Unemotional Traits  |  Fatherhood, Attachment, and Risky Behavior  |  Evaluating the Effects of Minimum Ages for Juvenile Court Jurisdiction – An Interrupted Time Series Approach  |  The Use of Direction-of-Causation & Mother-Daughter-Aunt-Niece Designs in Life-Course & Developmental Criminology: A Primer  |  Harmonizing the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth: Comparing the Generalizability of the NLSY-79C and NLSY97

2:00–3:20 p.m.
Research from Emerging Scholars in Life-Course Criminology
Crystal Room, 3rd Floor
Papers Does Delivery Timing Matter in Home Visiting? Comparing Prenatal and Postnatal Enrollment in HANDS  |  Exploring the Relationship Between Criminal Offending and Mental Health Symptoms in Adolescents and Young Adults: A Longitudinal Fixed-Effects Model  |  General Recidivism Among Sex Offenders: An Exploration of Correctional Data  |  Aging Populations in Prisons: A Comprehensive Umbrella Review  |  Age-Specific Barriers and Facilitators of Smoking Cessation: A Comparative Study of Young and Older Adults in the US

Thursday, November 19

8:00–9:20 a.m.
Integrating Health and Aging into Criminological Inquiry
Crystal Room, 3rd Floor
Papers Investigating Pathways from Offending to Mid-life Health  |  History of Incarceration and Vision Trajectories in Older US Adults  |  Incarceration as a Risk Factor for Job Conditions and Subsequent Health  |  Exposure to Violence, Loneliness, and Aging among Older Black Americans

8:00–9:20 a.m.
The Use of Qualitative Methods in Life-Course and Developmental Research
Burnham 4, 7th Floor
Papers Studying Incarceration and Reentry: Methods, Ethics, and Retention Strategies  |  Co-Designing a Longitudinal Study on Romani Children with Teachers  |  In the Face of Ambiguity: Exploring Young Adults’ Responses to Parental Incarceration

9:30–10:50 a.m.
Exploring the Relationship Between Criminal Justice Contacts, Health and Mental Health Outcomes
Salon 2, 3rd Floor
Papers More Problems or More People with Problems? Decomposing Age and Sex Differentials in the Growth in Police Deployments to People with Mental Health Challenges  |  Conviction Trajectories and Life-Course Outcomes  |  Recidivism Among Females Convicted of Violent Crimes: Exploring the Cumulative Impact of Psychological and Social Risk Factors  |  Recidivism among Violent Male Offenders: Exploring the Cumulative Impact of Psychological and Social Risk Factors

12:30–1:50 p.m.
Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology Annual Meeting
Salon 2, 3rd Floor

2:00–3:20 p.m.
Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology David Farrington Annual Lecture featuring Stephen Farrall
Salon 2, 3rd Floor

3:30–4:50 p.m.
New Insights from the Roads to Desistance Study: Health, Risk, Religion, Victimization, and Criminal Careers
Dearborn 1, 7th Floor
Papers An Intersectional Test of the Health-Based Theory of Desistance  |  Victimized and Criminalized: The Intertwined Narratives of Trauma and Offending  |  Breaking Bad Habits with the Good Book: Religion and Desistance from Crime  |  A Longitudinal and Intersectional Analysis of Risk-Taking  |  Criminal career patterns among a sample of drug-involved, high-risk individuals

5:00–6:20 p.m.
Governing Life Sentences: The Role of Race and Discretion
Salon 3, 3rd Floor
Papers Who Gets Released? Investigating Racial Patterns in Parole Outcomes for Life-Sentenced People  |  Implementing Juvenile Life without Parole Reform: Courtroom Communities’ Divergent Sensemaking of the “Hallmark Features of Youth.”  |  Does Racial Threat or Contact Theory Better Explain the Distribution of Life-Without-Parole Sentences?

7:00–8:30 p.m.
DLC Social Event
2Twenty2 Tavern, 22 S Wabash Ave, Chicago, IL 60604

Friday, November 20

8:00–9:20 a.m.
Policy-Implications of DLC Research 2: The Life-Course Consequences of Criminal Justice Policy
Crystal Room, 3rd Floor
Papers Running Out of Inmates? Cohort Non-Replacement and the Approaching End of Mass Incarceration  |  Life Course Consequences of Pre-Trial Detention  |  What About Those Who Live Here? Centering the Voices of Those Who Live and Work in Corrections  |  Tie Unemployment Benefits to Prison Labor to Provide Immediate Economic Relief During Reentry  |  Fiddling at the Edges: The Quest for Effective Young Adult Justice Policies  |  Restore the Vote – and Reduce Age Disparities in Political Power

8:00–9:20 a.m.
From Adolescence to Adulthood: Longitudinal Research on Key Factors Associated with Criminal Behavior
Burnham 1, 7th Floor
Papers The Longitudinal Impact of Anger Identity on Adult Offending  |  Exposure to Police Killings on Proximate and Long-Term Attitudes Toward the Police  |  Is Fear of Crime Measured Consistently Over Time?: A Longitudinal Test of Measurement Invariance from Adolescence to Adulthood  |  The Stability of Street Code Attitudes from Adolescence to Adulthood

11:00 a.m.–12:20 p.m.
Policy-Implications of DLC Research 1: Youth Justice Through a Life-Course Lens
Crystal Room, 3rd Floor
Papers More completely embrace the meaning and implementation of developmental youth justice  |  Divert, Deflect, or Do Nothing? Practical Recommendations for Handling Juvenile Delinquency  |  Eliminate (or Radically Reform) Criminal Risk Assessment  |  (How) Does Thinking of Desistance as an Intergenerational Process Reshape How We Think About Social Policy  |  Siblings, Crime, and Punishment  |  School Violence Prevention Requires a Holistic Response

11:00 a.m.–12:20 p.m.
Norm Orientations and Delinquency: Co-developments
Grant Park Parlor, 6th Floor
Papers The parallel development of norm orientations and delinquency  |  The development of moral norms and behavior in intimate partner violence  |  Desistance, norm orientations and their social correlates. A multinomial trajectory analysis.

12:30–1:50 p.m.
The Changing Landscape of Life Sentences: Institutions, Policy, and Lived Experience
Salon 2, 3rd Floor
Papers Local Economies and Ultimate Punishments: Explaining Life and Death Sentences in Texas  |  Cutting Life Short  |  “I am Still Alive”: Exploring Hope Among Incarcerated Lifers

2:00–3:00 p.m.
Neurocognitive and Neurobiological Mechanisms Underlying Antisocial Behaviors Across Development: Evidence from Three Countries
Salon 1, 3rd Floor
Papers Neurocognitive Functioning in Late-Onset Offenders  |  Structural Brain Deficits in Antisocial Children: Early Versus Late Neurodevelopmental Processes.  |  Relationship between theory of mind and Machiavellianism: the common brain functional connectivity indicators  |  Relationship between Proactive Aggression and Dark Triad Traits: Shared Brain Functional Connectivity Pathway

2026 DLC award recipients

Lifetime Achievement Award
Stephen Farrall, Professor, University of Nottingham

Outstanding Contribution Award
Per-Olof Wikström (Professor Emeritus, University of Cambridge; Professor, Malmö University), Kyle Treiber (Professor, University of Cambridge), Gabriela Roman (Assistant Research Professor, University of Cambridge)

Wikström, P.O.H., Treiber, K., Roman, G. (2024). Character, Circumstances, and Criminal Careers: Towards a Dynamic Developmental and Life-Course Criminology. Oxford University Press.

Character, Circumstances, and Criminal Careers makes an argument for a more dynamic approach to developmental and life-course criminology (DLC), focusing on the relationship between individual characteristics and environmental features and how these change across adolescence and into young adulthood. The authors examine whether childhood predictors, including social disadvantage and social adversity, influence different trajectories of crime involvement. The book also considers the age-crime curve and its explanation.

Outstanding Student Contribution Award
Alyssa Talaugon, Doctoral Candidate, Florida State University
Talaugon, A. R., & Turanovic, J. J. (2025). Childhood exposure to family violence, residential instability, and parental incarceration: Compounding household adversities and adolescent delinquency. Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 62(3), 387–428.

Student Paper Award
Thaís Moreira de Andrade, Doctoral Candidate, Arizona State University

Early Career Award
Guy Skinner, Assistant Professor, University of Cambridge

Meet the incoming Executive Board members

The recent European Society of Criminology conference offered an opportunity to bring together members of the ASC Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology and the Euro DLC Workgroup, highlighting the international reach of our field and the shared interests that connect us across borders.

These opportunities to gather create valuable space to exchange ideas, build collaborations, and strengthen our collective efforts to advance developmental and life-course criminology.

A special thank you to Babette C. M. van Hazebroek and Luc Robert, chairs of the Euro DLC Workgroup, for helping organize this get-together!

We look forward to reconnecting with colleagues at the American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting this November and to building on this momentum by making the ASC DLC and Euro DLC Workgroup gathering an annual tradition at EuroCrim!

Take a look at the photo below and see how many familiar faces you can spot!

Sarah Silberman talks with Alex Piquero about moments that shaped his career, his work in developmental and life-course criminology, and what he would like to see from the field.

The idea of serendipity leading to a turning point is familiar to developmental and life-course criminologists. Perhaps it is a chance meeting that turns into marriage that decreases offending, or maybe it is a change in the federal landscape increasing grant funding for widespread data collection. For Alex Piquero, it is what led him to some of the most defining features of his career. Working hand-in-hand with his remarkable work ethic and love of knowledge, serendipity brought him to the field of criminology, to developmental and life-course topics, to being appointed by President Biden to serve as the Director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and much more.

Alex completed his bachelor’s through PhD at the University of Maryland – College Park in the late 1980s and early 1990s, overlapping with scholars such as Doug Smith, Ray Paternoster, Sally Simpson, Charles Wellford, Lawrence Sherman, and many others. He did not enter undergrad wanting to be a criminologist (he was actually a radio, television, and film major) and only enrolled in Intro to Criminal Justice with Laurie Brooks because he “didn’t want a class before 11 AM and wanted a class on a Tuesday and a Thursday.” Now, he describes Brooks as “a person who changed my entire life” by sparking his interest in the field. Hooked on criminology, he took a methods class with Dr. Brooks, who invited him to work on a research project surveying police officers in Prince George’s County and Baltimore City, presenting results at ASC 1990 as a junior. Around this time, he helped Ray Paternoster with data collection for a different project by interviewing people who sat on death penalty juries in Baltimore. It was Paternoster who suggested he pursue graduate school and who he describes as “chang[ing] my entire life pathway.” Serendipity did not stop there, though.

As Alex was making his way through his education, developmental and life-course criminology was forming in earnest as its own sub-field, with important publications coming from the likes of Sampson and Laub, Moffitt, and Nagin.

Had I not gone to grad school when developmental and life-course criminology was literally coming out…I remember to this day Paul Mazerolle and I getting the photocopy of Terrie Moffitt’s 1993 developmental taxonomy paper. It came out during our first year of grad school. And it’s at this same time that Daniel Nagin was creating the trajectory methodology, literally at the exact same time. And Sampson and Laub wrote the book on turning points, so that literally was happening my first year of graduate school, so we were serendipitous enough to be located in a time and place where that was coming out.

Although it was a coincidence that put Alex in the same rooms as these foundational life-course thinkers, his impact on the field is due in no small part to his zeal for production and dissemination of knowledge, his open-minded attitude, and his relationships with his peers in graduate school and beyond. According to Alex, “no one handed me anything  when I was in grad school—and rightly so,” but “the environment forced us to work our butts off.” While his years as a grad student were no doubt a grind, Alex clearly remembers them with great fondness, smiling while he tells me about when he and Bobby Brame, with whom he spent hours walking the stacks, “found an error in a coefficient comparison test, brought it to Doug and Ray, and wrote a paper that’s been cited many times.” It was not the desire for cites that drove this project, however. I always think about something that Doug [Smith] and Ray [Paternoster] would tell me and Bobby. 1) Ask an interesting question that can be answered yes or no, 2) Do the best you can to answer it objectively with the appropriate methodology, and 3) That it is interesting regardless of how it turns out.

After graduate school, Alex began as a tenure-track professor at Temple University. His second year there, developmental psychologist Larry Steinberg won a MacArthur Foundation grant to fund a network on adolescent development and juvenile justice. Despite being a “brand new criminologist,” he had the agency to pick up the phone and call Dr. Steinberg, who after meeting with Alex, invited him to present to the research network at the Four Seasons in Washington DC, where he discussed his work with Brame on trajectories and violent crime. This network, which was made up of “psychologists, legal scholars, prosecutors, [and] defense attorneys” was “designed to be interdisciplinary” and to talk about “the real-world implications.”

After joining the network, one of the foundation monitors asked Alex and Jeff Fagan what we didn’t know about juvenile offending, to which they responded about the dearth of newer longitudinal data on serious offenders and how race, ethnicity, gender, and immigration status interact with offending. The monitors, in turn, asked how much it would cost to collect this data, and thus the Pathways to Desistance study was born.

So we had to pick two cities, and it ended up being Philadelphia and Phoenix. The only reason why Philly was there is the Temple Connection, and we had access to Philadelphia. Phoenix was happenstance, because other cities said no. And so Phoenix said yes, but they also had Hispanic data, so it was a boon.

Beyond innovating life-course data collection by considering other important factors in offending and making that available and the new standard for this type of collection, Pathways has played a pivotal role in both policy and research, including some pioneering work on immigration and crime co-authored with University of Maryland criminologist, Dr. Bianca Bersani.

One of the things we were very cognizant about, that we cared strongly about, was to make the data publicly available as soon as we could within the legal confines. It’s one of the most downloaded datasets within ICPSR, and we were purposeful to do that…I think of all the good we did, or at least hope we did, for bettering juvenile kids’ lives. So that was very, very nice to see that sometimes research does do what it should be doing. But what I’ve appreciated the most is the fact that it’s helped out so many younger scholars do papers and dissertations.

While academic research is valuable in and of itself, having a reach beyond the immediate field cannot be understated in its impact. Moreover, as someone whose grad school experience was defined by unarchived, unavailable data, Alex and his colleagues were keen to give future scholars access to data on a much wider scale. In this way, Alex sees the availability of Pathways as “returning [it] back to the community.”

Though Alex considers himself to be a generalist, someone who is motivated by “going down the rabbit hole [of] interesting questions,” his work in the life-course sphere gives him important perspective on the field and where to go from here.

Q: What do you see as the biggest strength and weakness of DLC today?

A: Strength number one is that it’s forced the field to say it’s not just the ills of society that drives people to offend. There are psychological reasons, biological reasons, situational reasons, and all of those things meet in time and space to create an environment for deviant behavior.

A second thing it did well was it illuminated things we could not see before, because it was growing up in the same time that these advances in statistical methodology were happening, like growth curve modeling and trajectory methodology. But that strength can now be a weakness, because I am unsure we need another three hundred trajectory studies.  We kind of know that there’s variability and there’s kind of two to four groups. We’ve got that pretty well down. So, I think that was a big illumination because we had not seen that before, but now we’ve seen enough of it.

Something I’d like to see less of is people starting off with an approach rather than a question. For example, a lot of people think that a successful dissertation has to be one that is mixed-methods. Perhaps yes, perhaps no, but we should not start with a method, but instead start with a question. What we need is more people saying, ‘I’m interested in these topics because they’re substantive.’ A methodology isn’t a substance; it’s a tool. And there are lots of tools. But I really think the stats stuff really has really gone a bit too far in some cases because many reviewers expect you to run every permutation possible, and it gets a little too much. I am not sure that we need 10 appendices in a journal article. So until people get past that, I just worry.

Notably, Alex doesn’t see himself “as a qualitative or quantitative person. It just depends on the question at hand, and I use whatever method’s available and fits best.”

Q: What do you want to see scholars do more?

A: We need much more fine-grained units of analysis. We collected monthly life calendars in Pathways. What we really need are day-long collections. There is variability in a day, and things happen at a specific period of time. So I’ve written a paper that talks about the need to collect time-stamped data where I lay out exactly what you would do. You could do week snapshots where people write about certain feelings at programmed times of the day, and then they’re pinged at various times to actually report on various things like cognitions and behaviors. Then you could also do labs where you measure cortisol and serotonin at different parts of the day.

We also need much more demographic-based, descriptive analysis. We’ve got a lot of good information on Black-White differences, but we don’t have good information on Hispanic differences, and Hispanic is such a large category. There’s a lot of variability there, just like there is among Blacks. For example, African American in Miami is not a term that’s used as much, because many Haitians don’t consider themselves African American. There are also other kinds of immigrant questions we need answers to, so we just generally need more of that, especially given the potential disconcerting changes to the Census.

Q: What fields should DLC scholars be looking towards?

A: The one that has the most overlap is psych, because it’s individual-level theories. Psych’s very longitudinally focused, with lots of self-report stuff.

Q: Do you have any advice for people who want to work in a public-facing role or with policymakers?

A: It’s very messy. You have to learn to work with everyone, regardless of their political orientation—especially if you want to be part of the solution. If you want to be part of the solution, you have to roll up your sleeves and work with people with whom you might not agree. So what I’ve come to tell my students and colleagues is that you have to find the things you can agree on, and you have to move the needle in ways that you can move the needle now and leave the other things for another day.

Though serendipity plays a role in all our lives, Alex Piquero serves as an example of how to embrace it and take it to the next level. In following his passions, asking the questions he likes and answering them with the appropriate method, and putting himself outside of the purely academic sphere, he shows us how to make the most of a career in criminology and do it all with a smile on his face.

Criminal legal system contact and youth mental health: Untangling a complex relationship

A new study by Raquel V. Oliveira and Elizabeth Culatta examines an important question about the relationship between criminal legal involvement and mental health: Do different types of contact with the criminal legal system have different short- and long-term effects on young people’s psychological well-being? Using longitudinal data from 1,322 justice-involved adolescents and young adults in the Pathways to Desistance Study, the authors examine three forms of criminal legal contact – arrest, court appearance, and institutionalization – and their associations with symptoms of anxiety, depression, hostility, and psychoticism over time. Their fixed-effects approach is particularly useful because it examines changes within the same individuals across multiple waves of data, helping to account for stable individual characteristics that might otherwise complicate the relationship.

The central takeaway is that even contacts with the criminal legal system that fall short of incarceration may function as meaningful stressors for young people – but their effects differ depending on the type of contact and the passage of time. Arrest was associated with short-term increases in anxiety, depression, and psychoticism, while institutionalization was associated with short-term increases in depression, hostility, and psychoticism. Neither arrest nor institutionalization, however, significantly predicted mental health symptoms at the following wave. Court appearances showed a notably different pattern: although they had little immediate negative association with mental health, appearing in court predicted subsequent increases in anxiety, depression, and psychoticism, suggesting that the psychological consequences of court involvement may emerge over a longer period.

The study also highlights the importance of thinking about criminal legal involvement as a continuum rather than focusing exclusively on incarceration. Cumulative contact was associated with short-term increases in depression and psychoticism and more consistent longer-term mental health effects. These findings fit with life-course and stress-process perspectives that conceptualize criminal legal contacts as potentially consequential life events capable of contributing to accumulated disadvantage. At the same time, causal relationships between mental health and criminal legal involvement are notoriously difficult to disentangle. Mental health symptoms may increase the likelihood of criminal legal contact; criminal legal contact may exacerbate psychological distress; and, quite plausibly, the two processes may reinforce one another over time. Although the study’s longitudinal fixed-effects design strengthens the analysis of temporal ordering, the authors appropriately caution that it cannot fully establish causality or rule out reciprocal effects.

Importantly, however, uncertainty about the direction of causation does not diminish the study’s central practical message. Whether criminal legal contact contributes to mental health problems, preexisting mental health difficulties increase the likelihood of system involvement, or both processes operate simultaneously, young people who come into contact with the criminal legal system represent a population with substantial mental health needs. Thus, the study offers an important practical message: supporting young people’s mental health requires attention not only after incarceration, but throughout their contact with the criminal legal system.

Prevention and diversion may help reduce unnecessary exposure to potentially stressful system contacts, while youth who do enter the system may benefit from accessible mental health screening, support, and services during and after their involvement. More broadly, the findings underscore the importance of treating mental health as a central consideration throughout young people’s interactions with the criminal legal system – not only after incarceration or once psychological difficulties become severe.

Oliveira, R. V., & Culatta, E. (2026). Effects of differential contacts with the criminal legal system on mental health outcomes of adolescents and young adults: A fixed-effects model. PLOS ONE, 21(6), e0344895. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0344895

Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology

In 2025 the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (JDLCC) maintained an impressive median of 12 days from submission to first decision, which is particularly noteworthy given the increasing challenge in locating peer reviewers for each manuscript. In this regard, we would also like to express our special appreciation to our reviewers, who generously devote a substantial amount of their time to reviewing manuscripts submitted to the Journal. In 2025, the Journal continued to rank in Quartile 1 in SCImago in the area of Law and was also indexed in the areas of Applied Psychology and Life-span and Life-course Studies (Impact Factor: 1.5).

Important Updates

We would like to share with readers of this newsletter several updates about the Journal.

The Journal continues to be widely recognized for publishing important scientific findings from prospective longitudinal studies and for its cohort profile articles. We now also aim to establish the JDLCC as a leading outlet for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, particularly those synthesizing evidence from longitudinal studies. This will further advance knowledge in the field and reinforce the Journal’s relevance to policy and the public. We therefore encourage readers working in this area to submit their systematic reviews and meta-analyses to the Journal. In addition, articles advancing innovative theoretical models in the field of developmental and life-course criminology are also very welcome.

Professor Manuel Eisner has stepped down from his position as Editor-in-Chief of the JDLCC, while remaining an Associate Editor. Miguel Basto-Pereira has taken on this role alongside Darrick Jolliffe. We would like to express our profound gratitude to Professor Eisner for his extraordinary and truly tireless work in service of the Journal over the years.

We are currently strengthening the Editorial Board. It is particularly important to us to recognize the generous contributions, made in the service of advancing knowledge in our field, of those who have served and continue to serve on the Editorial Board. This is also an opportunity to welcome our new members and thank them for accepting our invitation to join the Board. We will have more news to share on this soon. In addition, we would like to take this opportunity to thank Simone Castello, our Managing Editor, for her ongoing support of the Journal’s editorial activities.

The Journal now has a new LinkedIn page, and we invite everyone to follow us.

We currently have two Special Issues underway and invite readers to learn more about them:

A Decade of the Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology: Celebrating David Farrington Through an Evidence-Based History of the JDLCC’s Anniversary (March 2015–March 2025)

Rethinking Time in Developmental Criminology

JDLCC Publications

The Division’s Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology publishes four issues each year. Articles can be accessed through the Springer website.

To provide a sample of recent work published in the Journal, below we highlight eight papers published recently:

Female Offending Trajectories: A Systematic Review

Educational Attainment and Criminal Justice: A Nationwide Cohort Study of 4.3 Million Young People

Assessing Neurocognitive and Psychosocial Development in the Context of Adolescent Criminal Law: Current Practice and Practical Implications

Gender Differences in the Natural History of Antisocial Behaviour: A 40 Year Prospective Study

Rethinking Criminal Onset: Age at First Offence, Persistence, and Sex Differences

Revisiting the Longitudinal Link Between Emotional Neglect and Juvenile Delinquency: A Within- and Between-Person Perspective

Reciprocal Relationships, Reverse Causality, and Temporal Ordering: Testing Theories with Cross-lagged Panel Models

Life-Course Theory on the Spectrum: Autism, Neurodiversity, and the Boundaries of Developmental Criminology

For members who do not have institutional or library access, online access to the Journal is available through Division membership. Please contact the Division Secretary for further information.

JDLCC Profile

The Journal seeks to advance knowledge and understanding of the developmental dimensions of offending across the life course. Research that examines current theories, debates, and knowledge gaps within Developmental and Life-Course Criminology is encouraged. The Journal welcomes theoretical papers, empirical papers, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, particularly those synthesizing evidence from longitudinal studies, as well as papers that explore the translation of developmental and life-course research into policy and/or practice. Papers that present original research or explore new directions for research are also encouraged. The Journal welcomes all rigorous methodological approaches and orientations. The Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology encourages submissions from a broad array of cognate disciplines, including, but not limited to, psychology, statistics, sociology, psychiatry, neuroscience, geography, political science, history, social work, epidemiology, public health, and economics.

The Journal’s Co-Editors-in-Chief are Darrick Jolliffe of University College London, UK, and Miguel Basto Pereira of Ispa – Instituto Universitário, Portugal, and University College London, UK. The Associate Editors are Alex Piquero, USA; Georgia Zara, Italy; Manuel Eisner, UK; and Tara Renae McGee, Australia. The Journal’s Managing Editor is Simone Castello. Information about all members of the Editorial Board can be found online.

Further information about the Journal can be found on its website.

We welcome your submissions!

Editors-in-chief
Darrick Jolliffe
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Miguel Basto Pereira
William James Center for Research, Ispa – Instituto Universitário, Lisbon, Portugal
University College London, London, United Kingdom

Mark your calendar for these events of interest to the DLC community.

American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting
November 18–21, 2026 | Chicago, Illinois

Australian and New Zealand Society of Criminology (ANZSOC) Conference
December 1–3, 2026 | Adelaide, Australia

British Society of Criminology Conference 2027
July 20–23, 2027 | Belfast, Northern Ireland

American Sociological Association Annual Meeting 2027
August 6–10, 2027 | Chicago, Illinois

SLLS Annual Conference 2027
August 24–26, 2027 | Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Post-conference workshops are planned for August 27, 2027.
Call for abstracts: Opens November 2, 2026.

27th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology
September 15–18, 2027 | Skopje, North Macedonia

Sarah Banks

Sarah is an editor and writer with a background in criminology, research, and evidence-based policy and practice. She studied Criminology at Keele University in the UK and began her career as a researcher at Northumbria University. She subsequently worked in crime and justice research, policy and strategy in the nonprofit sector and in local and national government, with much of her work focusing on issues relevant to developmental and life-course criminology. For example, as part of a national government initiative, Sarah and Jo Sykes established the South and West Yorkshire Resettlement Consortium, which brought together nine local authorities to improve support for young people in and leaving custody and to track their experiences and outcomes over time.

Sarah moved to Houston, Texas, where she established a professional editing and writing business. She works primarily with academic, legal and educational content.

Would you like to contribute to the DLC Newsletter?

The Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology would welcome submissions for upcoming issues of its newsletter. We welcome contributions such as research highlights, interviews, book reviews, conference insights, and commentary on relevant emerging topics.

Contributing to the newsletter is an opportunity to share your work with a broad, international audience, increase the visibility of your research, and engage with scholars across disciplines and career stages.

If you have an idea or would like to contribute, we would be glad to hear from you.

Please email asc.dlc.chair@gmail.com with your ideas!

The Division of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology (DLC) was established in November 2012 and held its first meeting at the 2012 American Society of Criminology (ASC) Annual Meeting in Chicago. The Division was established by David Farrington and Tara Renae McGee. The DLC brings together researchers, practitioners, students, and others interested in developmental and life-course criminology and criminal careers. Members and those interested in joining the Division are welcome to attend DLC meetings and events at the annual ASC conference. Information about the Division, membership, events, awards, and other activities is available on the DLC website at dlccrim.org.

The aims of the Division are:
1. To advance developmental and life-course criminology and the study of criminal careers,

2. To bring together ASC members interested in discussing and supporting developmental and life-course research in criminology,

3. To facilitate and encourage interaction and dissemination of developmental and life-course research among ASC members, practitioners, funding agencies, policy-making bodies, and other relevant groups, and

4. To organize and promote ASC conference sessions related to issues in developmental and life-course research in criminology.