Age Structure, Disengaged Youth, and Race/Ethnicity-Specific Violence: Unravelling the Macro-level Age-Crime Paradox

• In Event: Covariates of Race-Specific Violence

Abstract

Criminological research has long recognized that violent offending is disproportionately concentrated among youth and young adults. However, macro-level studies routinely find that the relative size of the youthful population (e.g., percent ages 15-29) has mixed effects on place-level violence, with many studies showing lower rates of violent crime in locations with greater shares of youth. Recent studies suggest that these puzzling findings are due to a failure to disaggregate “disengaged” youthful populations from those that are attached to school, the workforce, or other mainstream institutions. However, research has yet to explore these relationships across race/ethnicity. The current study extends this line of research by exploring (1) race/ethnicity-specific effects of age structure (percent ages 15-29) on year 2010 violent crime rates for 232 census places in California and New York, and (2) the degree to which race/ethnicity-specific shares of disengaged youth account for age structure-violence relationships among white, black, and Latino populations. Implications of our findings for research on age, race, and crime and related theoretical perspectives suggesting invariance in age-crime and race-crime relationships are discussed.

Authors

• Ben H. Feldmeyer, University of Cincinnati

• Casey Taggart Harris, University of Arkansas

• Darrell Steffensmeier, Pennsylvania State University

• Jillian Shafer, University of Cincinnati