Poverty Traps, Economic Inequality and Incentives for Delinquency

Journal of Applied Economics, 2002

There is no more important issue in the economics of the family than the impact of parents on the behavior of their children. By providing rewards and imposing constraints, parents seek to affect their children's behavior. The explanation of these actions is that the child's conduct directly enters into the parent's utility function. In this paper, we use that framework to explore the role of parental control over his or her child's delinquent behavior. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we estimate the impact of family income and various dimensions of family structure on a youth's contact with the criminal justice system between the ages of 14 and 22. From this analysis, we conclude that the single most important factor affecting these measures of delinquency is the presence of his father in the home. All other factors, including family income, are much less important.

Wash. UJL & Pol'y, 2012

This Article, written for the 12th Annual Access to Equal Justice Colloquium, explores the disproportionate representation of lowincome children in the U.S. juvenile justice system. It examines the structural and institutional causes of this development, beginning with the most common points of entry into delinquency court-the child welfare system, public schools, retail stores, and neighborhood police presence. It introduces the concept of needs-based delinquency, a theory that challenges basic presuppositions about the method by which children are adjudicated delinquent. It argues that at each stage of the process-from intake through adjudication to disposition and probation-the court gives as much or more weight to the perceived-needs‖ of the child and her family than to the quality of the evidence against her or the ability of the state to prove its case. Typical features of the juvenile code, including the procedures for intake and diversion and the use of bench rather than jury trials, combine to shift the system's emphasis from an evaluation of a child's criminal responsibility to an assessment of a family's social service needs. The standard of proof, therefore, is determined in large part by the socioeconomic class of the accused rather than the nature of the forum, an orientation that lowers the state's burden for indigent juveniles while heightening it for affluent youth. The result is that in all but the most serious of cases, children from lowincome homes do not have to be as-guilty‖ as those from families of

Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 2007

The relationship between poverty and juvenile involvement in delinquency remains central to the study of adolescent development, but firm conclusions on this relationship have been elusive. The purpose of this study is to address an important limitation of prior research that often has been overlooked. This involves the standard practice of examining the poverty-delinquency relationship with an exclusive focus on the family's level of poverty. This study considers that the effects of family poverty on delinquency may significantly depend upon the level of poverty in the community in which the family lives. Specifically, drawing from a number of poverty-oriented theories of delinquency, we examine the hypothesis that community poverty amplifies the effects of family poverty, such that family poverty's effect becomes greater when community poverty also is high. Using data from a national sample of adolescents that are supplemented with U.S. census data, we find partial support for the idea that family poverty is consequential for delinquency, and that this is especially true for poor families that also live in poor communities.

The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-), 1979

3 See also A. COHEN, note 1 supra; Parsons, Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States, 7 AM. Soc. REV. 604 (1942). 4 See Rittenhouse, A Theory and Comparison of Male and Female Delinquency (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan) (1963).

Criminal Justice Matters, 2015

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 2002

Findings from aggregate-level and ethnographic research suggest that poverty and delinquency are related. The inability of individual-level quantitative research to demonstrate consistent evidence of this relationship, however, has been used to call into question whether poverty is indeed related to an increased propensity for delinquent involvement. This may be due to the difficulty individual-level analyses have in identifying the group most important in uncovering the relationship of poverty to delinquency-those individuals that experience persistent childhood poverty. This paper provides an assessment of the effects of both the level of exposure to poverty and its timing on delinquent involvement using fourteen years of longitudinal data for a national sample of younger adolescents. Findings indicate that exposure to poverty and the timing of such exposure are indeed related to an increased likelihood of involvement in delinquency.

2014

2013

This chapter examines the role of social inequality in crime and deviance by specifying a social psychological theory of the causal mechanisms by which inequality is associated with crime. We begin by noting that the powerful have more input into the content of criminal law, a point illustrated by the relatively soft penalties for white collar and corporate crimes compared to the harsh penalties for street crimes typically committed by the less powerful. We then draw on pragmatist social thought and criminological theory to provide an integrated social psychological explanation that helps explain how social inequality may produce high rates of crime. We apply this perspective to explain crime rates across neighborhoods and communities, as well as crime across the life course. We end with a discussion of the consequences of mass incarceration for reproducing social inequality in the United States.