Identity-based prosocial motivation protects detained youth against institutional infractions (2026).

Research Summary

Emerging theory suggests that prosocial identity motivation (PIM)—youth’s drive to disassociate from antisocial lifestyles and forge conventional identities aligned with prosocial values—may be crucial for promoting desistance among justice-involved adolescents. Yet, standardized tools to assess this construct are lacking, as is evidence of its protective value against continued antisocial behavior. We derived a measure of PIM from the Youth Assessment and Screening Instrument and tested whether it protects detained youth from serious and violent institutional infractions—behaviors that increase recidivism risk and deepen system penetration. We also examined whether the youth’s overall risk level moderates this relationship. Using data on 846 male detained youth (Mage 17) assessed by reliable staff, we integrated Youth Assessment and Screening Instrument scores with official infraction records over an average 6-month period and applied Cox proportional hazard survival analyses to examine the protective effect of PIM. PIM significantly protected against serious, hazard ratio infractions and provided incremental predictive utility beyond composite risk or strengths scores. Youth’s risk level moderated the protective effect for serious infractions, with benefits observed for low- and moderate-risk youth but not their higher risk counterparts. Youth’s PIM protects against institutional infractions—an important first step toward desistance. These findings suggest that juvenile justice systems should move beyond solely addressing criminogenic needs among incarcerated youth to recognize identity transformation as a developmentally relevant pathway to behavior change.

This study shows that when young people in detention facilities want to change their lives and become law-abiding citizens, they are much less likely to get into serious trouble while incarcerated—an important first step toward avoiding future crime. These findings suggest that juvenile justice programs should provide services that help youth envision positive futures for themselves and build on their strengths, rather than exclusively focusing on reducing risks.