Disentangling the Age-Crime Relationship: Linking Individual and Community Institutional (Dis)Engagement

• In Event: The Criminology of Space and Place

Abstract

Based on a compositional framework, criminological theory posits a positive relationship between the size of youth age-structure and crime rates in area-level analyses. However, scholarship has often provided inconsistent support for this hypothesized relationship. Recognizing that youth populations are heterogeneous in their level of institutional attachment, recent research finds support for the concept of differential institutional engagement which is said to explain the inconsistent relationship between age structure and crime.
The concept of differential institutional engagement is conceived of as the extent to which individuals are involved in “mainstream” social institutions. This paper extends extant ecological-level findings to a multi-level model, whereby individuals are nested in neighborhoods (tracts) to distinguish and estimate the effects of differential institutional engagement at the individual and contextual levels. Such an analysis allows us to determine the relative influence of individuals’ levels of institutional engagement on crime outcomes versus that of the context in which they are embedded.

Authors

• Cindy Brooks Dollar, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

• Patricia L. McCall, North Carolina State University

• Joshua A. Hendrix, North Carolina State University