The Role of Re-arrests in Juvenile Offenders’ and Their Mothers’ Attitudes Toward Police.

• In Event: Legal Socialization: New Insights and Applications

Abstract

Youths’ attitudes toward the justice system are malleable during adolescence through both personal experiences (Brunson, 2007) and parental socialization (Cavanagh & Cauffman, 2015). The present study uses longitudinal interviews with first-time youth offenders and their mothers to compare the relative effect of mothers’ attitudes and youths’ re-arrests on trajectories of youths’ attitudes toward police. Furthermore, we examine how parents’ attitudes toward police are affected by their child’s re-arrests. Group-based trajectory modeling identified four trajectories of youth’s attitudes toward police over the three years since his first arrest. A series of multinomial logistic regressions found that mothers with more positive initial attitudes toward the police were more likely to have sons with positive attitude trajectories. Surprisingly, youth rearrests were not significantly associated with trajectory group membership. Mothers whose sons were re-arrested had more negative attitudes toward the police after 3 years. The results suggest that mothers’ attitudes toward police—but not youth rearrests—are associated with youth attitude trajectories. Furthermore, mothers’ attitudes toward the police become more negative over time if their sons are re-arrested. Taken together, the results suggest that a family-level perspective is necessary when considering the effects of re-arrests on youths’—and their parents’—attitudes toward the police.

Authors

• Caitlin Cavanagh, Michigan State University

• Elizabeth Cauffman, University of California, Irvine