Industrialization, Urbanization, and Juvenile Crime:A Cross-National Comparison

• In Event: Causes of Crime and Deviance from a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Although socio-economic literature is growing, relatively little and new attention has been given to answer the questions “Why rates of juvenile crime rates are vary across diverse societies?” Specifically, since Bennett and Basiotis’s work (1991) on structural correlates of juvenile property crime, little empirical research has been conducted to better understand relationship between socio-economic conditions and juvenile crime. As Rosenfeld, Edberg, Fang, and Florence (2013) discussed, recently, many juvenile justice experts and government agency (i.e., Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have begun to pay attention the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and youth violence in the fall of 2008. The current study attempts to fill unfilled area of juvenile crime by employing on a theoretical model of macro-level explanation proposed by Messner and Rosenfeld (1994) utilizing international juvenile crime data, a rarity in studies of juvenile crime.

Authors

• Seokjin Jeong, University of Texas at Arlington

• Sungmin Han, Michigan State University

• Byung Hyun Lee, Michigan State University