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Not only are psychiatric disorders common in adolescent legal offenders, but these also portend poor outcomes, including reoffending, substance use, and intimate partner violence in adulthood. In a systematic review, investigators searched for studies published from 1966 to 2019 on prevalence of mental disorders in youth aged 10 to 19 years who were in juvenile detention or prison.
The prevalence of five psychiatric disorders was extracted from the 47 studies that met criteria for meta-analysis, which covered 32,787 adolescents (28,033 males), with a mean age of 16. Of the sample, 86% were from the U.S.; studies from 18 other countries each contributed between 35 and 1145 individuals to the pool.
Conduct disorder was diagnosed in 62% of males…