This paper uses data from a randomized housing-mobility experiment to study the effects of relocating families from high-to low-poverty neighborhoods on juvenile crime. Outcome measures come from juvenile arrest records taken from government administrative data. Our ndings seem to suggest that providing families with the opportunity to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods reduces violent criminal behavior by teens.

Successful community reentry and the criminological impact of incarceration may depend in part on the attitudes (and consequent reactions) that prisoners encounter after release. Theories of social stigma suggest that such attitudes depend, in turn, on the levels of familiarity with the stigmatized group (the normalization thesis) as well as on the credibility and trust they accord to sanctioning agents (the legitimation thesis). To assess these two hypotheses, we present the first multivariate analysis of public attitudes toward ex‐offenders. Data from a four‐state, random‐digit telephone survey of more than 2,000 individuals indicate that, net of controls, personal familiarity with ex‐offenders may soften attitudes, whereas confidence in the courts may harden them. As expected, non‐Hispanic Whites, conservatives, and southern residents hold more negative views of ex‐offenders. Our findings lend indirect support to concerns that incarceration is becoming “normalized”, and we suggest strategies for reducing the stigma of incarceration.

Engagement in school is crucial for academic success and school completion. Surprisingly little research has focused on the relationship between student engagement and delinquency. This study examines whether engagement predicts subsequent school and general misconduct among 4,890 inner-city Chicago elementary school students (mean age: 11 years and 4 months; 43.3% boys; 66.5% black; 28.8% Latino). To improve upon prior research in this area, we distinguish three types of engagement (emotional, behavioral, and cognitive), examine whether the relationship between engagement and misconduct is bidirectional (misconduct also impairs engagement), and control for possible common causes of low engagement and misconduct, including peer and family relationships and relatively stable indicators of risk-proneness. Emotional and behavioral engagement predict decreases in school and general delinquency. However, cognitive engagement is associated with increases in these outcomes. School and general delinquency predict decreased engagement only in the cognitive domain. Suggestions for future research and implications for policy are discussed.

American schools increasingly define and manage the problem of student discipline through a prism of crime control. Most theoretical explanations fail to situate school criminalization in a broader structural context, to fully explain its spatio-temporal variations, and to specify the processes and subjectivities that mediate between structural and legal forces and the behavior of school actors. A multilevel structural model of school criminalization is developed which posits that a troubled domestic economy, the mass unemployment and incarceration of disadvantaged minorities, and resulting fiscal crises in urban public education have shifted school disciplinary policies and practices and staff perceptions of poor students of color in a manner that promotes greater punishment and exclusion of students perceived to be on a criminal justice `track'.

This article suggests that contact with the legal system increased school dropout in a Chicago sample of 4,844 inner-city students. According to multilevel multivariate logistic models, students who were first arrested during the 9th or 10th grade were six to eight times more likely than were nonarrested students ever to dropout of high school and are about 3.5 times more likely to drop out in Grades 9 and 10. However, selection bias is a real concern. To improve causal inference, students who were first arrested in Grade 9 (n = 228) are compared to 9th graders (n = 153) who were first arrested a year later. Given this sampling restriction, the groups hardly differ on many observables. Yet early arrest still increases early school dropout in models with many relevant covariates. The 9th-grade arrestees are also compared to matched students who avoided arrest. Similar intergroup differences in the risk of dropout were observed. Thus, being arrested weakens subsequent participation in urban schools, decreasing their capacity to educate and otherwise help vulnerable youths.