Enduring Consequences of Adolescent Neighborhood and School Contexts for Adult Arrest

• In Event: New from PHDCN+: Long-term Consequences of Early Life Contexts and Criminal Legal Contact for Adult Well-Being

Abstract

Research on individuals’ risk of arrest is dominated by a focus on early-life family and neighborhood contexts. Moving beyond families and neighborhoods, we assess the unique contribution of school contexts in shaping individuals’ life course risk of arrest. We do so with five waves of data from the Project on Human Development of Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN+), a multi-cohort longitudinal survey of Chicago youth initiated in 1995 and followed up through 2021. We focus specifically on respondents who were approximately ages 9, 12 and 15 during the wave 1 interviews, and link the survey data to their Chicago Public School attendance data and multiple waves of school-level information from the Chicago Consortium on School Research (1994-2003). Preliminary results indicate that individuals exposed to higher rates of school poverty over the course of adolescence are at a significantly higher risk of being arrested as an adult, with an effect size rivaling that of adolescent exposure to neighborhood poverty. Furthermore, results from Cox models offer evidence that those exposed to schools with greater school collective efficacy experience a lower hazard of becoming arrested as an adult. Implications for research on contextual effects, schools, neighborhoods, and the life course will be discussed.

Authors

• Nicolo Pinchak, Centre for Social Investigation, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

• David Kirk, University of Pennsylvania