Siblings, Crime, and Punishment

• In Event: Policy-Implications of DLC Research 1: Youth Justice Through a Life-Course Lens

Abstract

Classic criminological scholarship emphasizes sibling correlations in delinquency, criminal offending, and system contact. This foundational work, however, has mostly not translated to a rich contemporary research agenda on whether and how siblings influence one another —an unfortunate omission given that siblings spend significant time together through the life course. In this presentation, we lean on interdisciplinary scholarship to argue that siblings have been both undertheorized and under-analyzed in criminology and use broader scholarship on families to highlight the practical barriers for developing sound policy to address family-level consequences of crime and system contact.

Authors

• Sara Wakefield, Rutgers University - Newark

• Garrett Baker, Duke University