cover image: Youth criminal participation and household economic status

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20.500.12592/25j4q7

Youth criminal participation and household economic status

19 Apr 2004

The first part of the paper indicates that there exists a strong negative relationship between house- hold economic status and youth participation in serious crimes, with youth from households in the poorest third of the wealth distribution being over 65 percent more likely to have participated in a serious crime over the observation period than youth coming from households in the richest third of [...] Similarly, the expected costs of criminal behavior take into account the probability of getting caught, the disutility of the punishment if caught, the opportunity costs of the time it takes to commit the crimes and possibly spend time in jail, the effects of arrests on future wages, as well as the moral psychic costs associated with breaking the law. [...] The length of this “observation year” does not appear to differ substantially across the wealth distribution, with the mean length for the youth from the poorest third of the household wealth distribution averaging 20.1 months between the first and second round interviews (with a standard error of 0.06), youth from the middle third of the household wealth distribution averaging 19.8 months between [...] The first group of bars in Figure I(a) shows the relationship between a youth participation in any crime in the observation year and household economic status as measured by where the household lies in the household income distribution just prior to the observation year. [...] While 93 percent of youth from a household in the richest third of 19 the wealth distribution expected an over 90 percent probability of graduating from high school by the time they were 20, only 73 percent of the youth from a household in the poorest third of the distribution expected the same.
education poverty crime criminal law homicide income juvenile delinquency juvenile delinquents law law enforcement savings social accounting distribution of wealth theft survey mobility further education class crime, law and justice mean errors and residuals household income in the united states punishment (criminal) median youth crime f-test sampled group

Authors

Bjerk, David

Pages
56
Published in
Canada

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