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Objectives: To examine how school discipline may serve as a negative turning point for youth and contribute to increased odds of arrest over time and to assess whether suspensions received across multiple years may present a “cumulative” increase in odds of arrest. Methods: Using four waves of data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we use a longitudinal hierarchical generalized linear model (HGLM) to explore how school suspensions contribute to odds of arrest across time while controlling for a number of theoretically important dimensions such as race, age, delinquency, and gender among others. Results: Results show that youth who are suspended are at an increased risk of experiencing an arrest across time relative to youth who are not suspended and that this effect increases across time. Further, with each subsequent year the youth is suspended, there is a significant increase in odds of arrest. Conclusion: Supporting prior work, we find that youth who receive a suspension are at an increased odds of contact with the criminal justice system, and increases in the number of suspensions received contribute to significant increases in odds of arrest. Findings demonstrate that suspensions present a form of cumulative effect over time.

Objective: Research on the relationship between religion and criminal recidivism has produced encouraging but ultimately inconclusive findings. This study offers a new direction for studying the role of religious support in reentry, providing a longitudinal analysis of the effect of change in religious support on both crime and noncrime outcomes postrelease. Methods: Employing mixed-effects longitudinal analyses, this study uses data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative to examine the impact of religious support on postrelease substance use, criminal recidivism, and employment. Results: Religious support had strong and robust prosocial effects on both postrelease employment and substance use. The relationship between religious support and recidivism, however, did not reach statistical significance when we added social support to the research model. Conclusion: Religious support and meaning making seems to help people address their criminogenic needs and also seems to be an important responsivity factor that is often overlooked in criminological theory and practice. Religious support must therefore be recognized as an important theoretical and practical variable in current efforts to develop successful reentry pathways.

Turning points, between-person differences, and within-person changes have all been linked to desistance from crime. Nevertheless, the means through which between- person differences are frequently captured in life-course criminology makes them intertwined with, and perhaps confounded by, turning points in life. We propose that a new way of capturing the between-person effect—the baseline between-person difference—could benefit theoretically informed tests of developmental and life-course issues in criminology. Because they occur at one time point immediately preceding a turning point in life, we demonstrate that baseline between-person differences establish meaningful theoretical connections to behavior and the way people change over time. By using panel data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative, we estimate models capturing within-person change and baseline between-person differences in social bonds (family support) and differential association (peer criminality) at the time of release from prison. The results demonstrate that baseline levels of family support protect people from postrelease substance use but not from crime. Baseline between- person differences and within-person changes in peer criminality, however, are robustly related to crime and substance use. Collectively, baseline between-person differences seem critical for behavior and within-person change over time, and the results carry implications for reentry-based policy as well as for theory testing in developmental criminology more broadly.

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Research Summary Although family support is an important protective factor against recidivism, less is known about how the domain of family works with other elements of the risk–need–responsivity model. By using the Serious and Violent Offenders Reentry Initiative (SVORI) data, we explore whether family and criminal peers have (a) independent and (b) interdependent effects on substance abuse and crime after release from prison. The outcomes of multilevel models demonstrate that the risk factor of criminal peers is as strong, or stronger, of a predictor of substance abuse and crime as is the protective factor of family support for offenders during reentry. Policy Implications Institution‐based policies aimed primarily at improving family ties for reentering offenders must begin focusing as much on peers as they do on family. These programs should instead focus on improving family ties (thereby increasing a protective factor) while focusing on severing the offender's relationships with criminally inclined friends (thereby decreasing a risk factor).