This manuscript examines whether certain fundamental demographic changes in age structures across racial groups might help explain incarceration rates in the United States. We argue that a “demographic divide”—a growing divergence in the age structures of blacks and whites—was an important factor that contributed to the nation’s rising incarceration rates. Where age disparities between blacks and whites were higher ideological conservatism and religious fundamentalism increased, as did incarceration rates. We contend that historical forces shape how groups respond to subsequent social problems and proposed solutions to them and explore how “generational effects” may shape law and policy. Specifically, we suggest that states with older white and younger black populations created fertile conditions for a more punitive brand of politics and penal policy. We analyze decennial state-level data from 1970 to 2010 and examine whether differences in the median ages of blacks and whites contributed to changing incarceration rates within states over time. We situate our findings within the broader scholarship that has engaged the complex links between race, religion, political conservatism, and punishment. Our findings illustrate the importance of accounting for long-term shifts in social structure in understanding more proximate changes in law and policy.@en

Scholars have become increasingly interested in how social environments condition the relationships between individual risk-factors and adolescent behavior. An appreciable portion of this literature is concerned with the relationship between impulsivity and delinquency across neighborhood settings. The present article builds upon this growing body of research by considering the more nuanced pathways through which neighborhood disadvantage shapes the development of impulsivity and provides a situational context for impulsive tendencies to manifest in violent and aggressive behaviors. Using a sample of 12,935 adolescent from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) (mean age = 15.3, 51% female; 20% Black, 17% Hispanic), we demonstrate the extent to which variation in the association between impulsivity and delinquency across neighborhoods can be attributed to (1) differences in mean-levels of impulsivity and violence and (2) differences in coefficients across neighborhoods. The results of a series of multivariate regression models indicate that impulsivity is positively associated with self-reported violence, and that this relationship is strongest among youth living in disadvantaged neighborhoods. The moderating effect of neighborhood disadvantage can be attributed primarily to the stronger effect of impulsivity on violence in these areas, while differences in average levels of violence and impulsivity account for a smaller, yet nontrivial portion of the observed relationship. These results indicate that the differential effect of impulsivity on violence can be attributed to both developmental processes that lead to the greater concentration of violent and impulsive adolescents in economically deprived neighborhoods as well as the greater likelihood of impulsive adolescents engaging in violence when they reside in economically disadvantaged communities.@en

This paper proposes a framework to assess how compositional differences at the neighborhood level contribute to the moderating effect of neighborhood context on the association between individual risk-factors and delinquency. We propose a neighborhoodbased group decomposition to partition person-context interactions into their constituent components. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we demonstrate the extent to which variation in the association between impulsivity and delinquency can be attributed to (1) differences in mean-levels of impulsivity and violence in disadvantaged neighborhoods and (2) differences in coefficients across neighborhoods. The moderating effect of neighborhood disadvantage can be attributed primarily to the stronger effect of impulsivity on violence in disadvantaged neighborhoods, while differences in average levels of violence and impulsivity account for 14 percent and 2 percent of the observed difference, respectively.@en

Residential mobility is often implicated as a risk factor for delinquency. While many scholars attribute this to causal processes spurred by moving, recent research suggests that much of the relationship is due to differences between mobile and non-mobile adolescents. However, studies in this area often operationalize mobility as a single move, limiting researchers to comparing outcomes between mobile and non-mobile adolescents. This approach is rather broad, considering heterogeneity in mobility frequency as well as variation in sending and receiving neighborhood characteristics. We propose a more nuanced framework to help anticipate how characteristics of mobility experiences may mitigate, exacerbate, or fail to influence adolescent behavior. Drawing on data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) and the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), we demonstrate that “hypermobility” has detrimental behavioral consequences, increases in neighborhood disadvantage between sending and receiving neighborhoods are associated with reductions in self-reported offending, and long-distance moves reduce delinquency, but only among adolescents with prior behavioral problems. These results underscore the complex association between residential mobility and delinquency during adolescence.@en

Studies of neighbourhood effects often attempt to identify causal effects of neighbourhood characteristics on individual outcomes, such as income, education, employment, and health. However, selection looms large in this line of research and it has been repeatedly argued that estimates of neighbourhood effects are biased as people non-randomly select into neighbourhoods based on their preferences, income, and the availability of alternative housing. We propose a two-step framework to help disentangle selection processes in the relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and earnings. We first model neighbourhood selection using a discrete choice framework and derive correction components to adjust parameter estimates in a subsequent neighbourhood effects model for the unequal probability that an individual ‘chooses’ to live in a particular area. Applying this technique to administrative data from the Netherlands, we find significant interactions between personal and neighbourhood characteristics in the selection model. This confirms individual differences in neighbourhood preferences; individuals non-randomly select into neighbourhoods. The baseline neighbourhood effects model reveals a significant effect of average neighbourhood income on individual income. When we include correction components for the differential sorting of individuals into specific neighbourhoods, the effect of neighbourhood income diminishes, but remains significant. These results suggest that researchers need to be attuned to the role of selection bias when assessing the role of neighbourhood effects on individual outcomes. Perhaps more importantly, the strong, persistent effect of neighbourhood deprivation on subsequent earnings suggests that neighbourhood effects reflect more than the shared characteristics of neighbourhood residents; place of residence partially determines economic well-being.@en

Studies of neighborhood effects often attempt to identify causal effects of neighborhood characteristics on individual outcomes, such as income, education, employment, and health. However, selection looms large in this line of research, and it has been argued that estimates of neighborhood effects are biased because people nonrandomly select into neighborhoods based on their preferences, income, and the availability of alternative housing. We propose a two-step framework to disentangle selection processes in the relationship between neighborhood deprivation and earnings. We model neighborhood selection using a conditional logit model, from which we derive correction terms. Driven by the recognition that most households prefer certain types of neighborhoods rather than specific areas, we employ a principle components analysis to reduce these terms into eight correction components. We use these to adjust parameter estimates from a model of subsequent neighborhood effects on individual income for the unequal probability that a household chooses to live in a particular type of neighborhood. We apply this technique to administrative data from the Netherlands. After we adjust for the differential sorting of households into certain types of neighborhoods, the effect of neighborhood income on individual income diminishes but remains significant. These results further emphasize that researchers need to be attuned to the role of selection bias when assessing the role of neighborhood effects on individual outcomes. Perhaps more importantly, the persistent effect of neighborhood deprivation on subsequent earnings suggests that neighborhood effects reflect more than the shared characteristics of neighborhood residents: place of residence partially determines economic well-being.@en

Objectives The current study replicates prior national-level research on the relationship between crimes committed for monetary gain and inflation in a sample of 17 U. S. cities between 1960 and 2013. Methods A random coefficients model is used to estimate the effects of inflation on the change in acquisitive crime over time, controlling for other influences. Results The estimates yield significant effects of inflation on acquisitive crime rates in the 17 cities. City-specific coefficients reveal nontrivial variation across the cities in the significance, size, and impact of inflation on acquisitive crime.Conclusions Continued low inflation rates should restrain future crime increases in many US cities. U. S. monetary policy should be evaluated with respect to its effect on crime.@en

A large body of literature suggests that neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage is positively associated with out-mobility. However, prior research has been limited by (1) the inability to account for endogenous factors that both funnel families into deprived neighborhoods and increase their likelihood of moving out, and (2) the failure to consider how the spatial distribution of socioeconomic deprivation in the broader community conditions the effect of local deprivation on mobility. This paper attends to this gap in the literature by examining how changes in socioeconomic disadvantage between sending and receiving neighborhoods and the spatial patterning of deprivation in the areas surrounding destination neighborhoods influence future mobility among a representative sample of American adolescents. We employ a modeling strategy that allows us to examine the unique and separable effects of local and extralocal neighborhood disadvantage while simultaneously holding constant time-invariant factors that place some youth at a greater likelihood of experiencing a residential move. We find that moves to more impoverished neighborhoods decrease the likelihood of subsequent mobility and that this effect is most pronounced among respondents who move to neighborhoods surrounded by other similarly deprived neighborhoods. In this sense, geographical pockets of disadvantage strengthen the mobility-hampering effect of neighborhood deprivation on future mobility.@en

esearch examining the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and adolescent offending typically examines only the influence of residential neighborhoods. This strategy may be problematic as 1) neighborhoods are rarely spatially independent of each other and 2) adolescents spend an appreciable portion of their time engaged in activities outside of their immediate neighborhood. Therefore, characteristics of neighborhoods outside of, but geographically proximate to, residential neighborhoods may affect adolescents’ propensity to engage in delinquent behavior. We append a spatially lagged, distance-weighted measure of socioeconomic disadvantage in “extralocal” neighborhoods to the individual records of respondents participating in the first two waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 Cohort (N = 6,491). Results from negative binomial regression analyses indicate that the level of socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods is inversely associated with youth offending, as theories of relative deprivation, structured opportunity, and routine activities would predict, and that the magnitude of this effect rivals that of the level of disadvantage in youths’ own residential neighborhoods. Moreover, socioeconomic disadvantage in extralocal neighborhoods suppresses the criminogenic influence of socioeconomic disadvantage in youths’ own neighborhoods, revealing stronger effects of local neighborhood disadvantage than would otherwise be observed.@en

Research suggests that positive school environments contribute to lower levels of school disorder. Studies have also documented stark differences between how students and personnel perceive their schools. The current study examines such “perception discrepancies” as a meaningful dimension of the school environment, investigating the hypothesis that when students perceive their schools as less cohesive than their teachers, they are more likely to engage in delinquent conduct. The University of Missouri–St. Louis Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (UMSL CSSI) study allows comparisons between student and personnel perceptions of school climate among an analytic sample of 2741 students nested in 12 American middle schools (average age = 13.6; 54% female; 39% black; 39% white). The results of a series of hierarchical regression models demonstrate that students engage in higher levels of delinquency when they perceive their school environments as less cohesive, on average, than do school personnel. This suggests that discrepancies among students and personnel concerning aspects of the school climate represent a deficiency in the school’s ability to protect against student delinquency.@en

We argue that a rational choice framework can be used to explain declines in offending from adolescence to young adulthood in two ways. First, subjective expectations of offending can be age graded such that perceptions of rewards decrease and perceptions of risks and costs increase. Second, the marginal (dis)utility of crime may be age graded (e.g., preferences for risks, costs, and rewards). We examine changes in offending from adolescence to young adulthood among a subset of individuals from the Pathways to Desistance Study (N = 585) and employ a nonlinear decomposition model to partition differences in offending attributable to changing subjective expectations (X) and changing marginal utilities (β). The results indicate that both have direct and independent effects on changes in offending over time. The results of a detailed decomposition on the subjective expectations also indicate that differences exist across the type of incentives. That is, the effect of changing expectations is attributed mainly to changes in perceived rewards (both social and intrinsic). Changing expectations of social costs and risk of arrest from offending have weak effects on changes in criminal behavior, which suggests that they must be accompanied by increases in the weight placed on these expectations to promote appreciable declines in offending.@en

We argue that a rational choice framework can be used to explain declines in offending from adolescence to young adulthood in two ways. First, subjective expectations of offending can be age graded such that perceptions of rewards decrease and perceptions of risks and costs increase. Second, the marginal (dis)utility of crime may be age graded (e.g., preferences for risks, costs, and rewards). We examine changes in offending from adolescence to young adulthood among a subset of individuals from the Pathways to Desistance Study (N = 585) and employ a nonlinear decomposition model to partition differences in offending attributable to changing subjective expectations (X) and changing marginal utilities (β). The results indicate that both have direct and independent effects on changes in offending over time. The results of a detailed decomposition on the subjective expectations also indicate that differences exist across the type of incentives. That is, the effect of changing expectations is attributed mainly to changes in perceived rewards (both social and intrinsic). Changing expectations of social costs and risk of arrest from offending have weak effects on changes in criminal behavior, which suggests that they must be accompanied by increases in the weight placed on these expectations to promote appreciable declines in offending.@en