A Choice Approach to Education and Crime

• In Event: Advancing our Understanding of Choice and Decision Making

Abstract

Extant research indicates that education has plausibly causal crime reducing effects yet provides little insight into why. A choice approach to education and crime suggests that education reduces crime by altering cost-benefit assessments of crime. I analyze data from the Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal sample of justice-involved adolescents followed over the transition from adolescence to young adulthood, to address three research questions: 1) Does education credentialing reduce offending? 2) Does education credentialing alter perceptions of the costs and benefits of crime? 3) If so, do perceptions of the costs and benefits of crime attenuate observed associations between education credentialing and offending behavior? Preliminary results of within-person analytic approaches support the notion that education reduces crime. Moreover, education credentialing is associated with changes in perceptions of the costs and benefits of crime and these changes partially attenuate the education-crime link. Findings will be discussed through a choice perspective.

Author

• Brandy R. Parker, The Pennsylvania State University