Understanding neighborhoods and individuals hold the promise of providing a more comprehensive perspective of the development and experiences of juvenile offenders. Through the adoption of tools, like juvenile offender risk assessment instruments, juvenile courts have the potential to understand how offenders' criminogenic behaviors vary as a function of their neighborhood context. The purpose of this exploratory study was two-fold. First, this study examined differences in juvenile offenders (N=893) recidivism based on the type of neighborhood the juvenile lived in at the time of his/her first offense, while controlling for individual-level and proximal risk factors known to predict delinquency (i.e. race, gender, and risk type). Rates of recidivism were compared across three types of neighborhoods (i.e. Distressed, Resilient, and Benchmark). Each neighborhood type represented the socio-economic conditions of the neighborhood as determined by archival US Census data. Second, this study examined the moderating effect of neighborhood type on risk and recidivism. A multilevel Cox Proportional Hazard Model revealed that when controlling for individual characteristics (i.e. risk group, race, and gender) recidivism did not vary by neighborhood type. Additionally, neighborhood type did not significantly moderate the relationship between risk and recidivism. Implications of these findings are discussed.
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