Revisiting the Associations Between Crime, Criminal Justice Contact, and Educational Attainment

• In Event: 4155 - Section on Crime, Law, and Deviance Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 4. Current Policies and New Directions in Youth Justice

Abstract

In the United States, the status dropout rate has dropped by more than half since the mid-1970s. As society has become more educated, the weight that failing to meet educational milestones plays has increased and is expected to continue to increase in the coming years. The growing importance of educational attainment is particularly concerning for one of society’s most vulnerable and educationally disadvantaged groups: persons involved in crime and the criminal justice system. Decades of research have documented that youth involved in crime and the criminal justice system are more likely to dropout of school than their counterparts. This line of research has tended to focus on the high school dropout versus graduate dichotomy with a lack of attention to education credential heterogeneity among high school dropouts. Emerging literature documents a higher rate of school dropout followed by GED completion among justice-involved youth than youth not involved with the justice system (Apel and Sweeten 2009). Moreover, despite the centrality of schooling to criminological theories, the mechanisms underlying associations between crime, criminal justice contact, and educational attainment are not well understood. Sampson and Laub’s (1993) age-graded theory of informal social control provides the potential for deepening our understanding of the links between crime, criminal justice contact, and educational attainment. I use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97) and the Pathways to Desistance (Pathways) to address the following research questions: 1) Are differences in adolescent offending and criminal justice contact history associated with future educational attainment? 2) If associations exist, can they be partially explained by the deterioration of social bonds? The results of this research will provide important nuance to existing literature by differentiating dropouts with a GED from high school dropouts without a GED and examining potential mechanisms through which crime and criminal justice contact influence educational attainment.

Author

• Brandy R. Parker, Pennsylvania State University