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The Transition to Adulthood of Contemporary Delinquent Adolescents

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Abstract

Purpose

To document how age-graded social bonds, specifically employment and partnering, are timed and sequenced during the transition to adulthood among contemporary delinquent adolescents, and how these trajectories compare with those of non-delinquents to better inform contemporary desistance research.

Methods

Multiple sequence and cluster analyses were conducted using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (n = 8984) to describe the trajectories young adults take through the transition to adulthood. Multinomial logistic regression was used to predict cluster membership by adolescent criminal behavior and arrest history.

Results

Contemporary delinquent adolescents are significantly less likely to experience traditional sources of informal control (e.g., marriage, full-time employment) compared with their non-delinquent counterparts and past cohorts, and those who do experience similar age-graded controls tend to do so later during the transition to adulthood. Crime and arrests during adolescence are also more consequential in determining partnering and employment trajectories for women compared with men.

Conclusions

In comparison with past cohorts, contemporary delinquent adolescents are far less likely to experience the traditional social bonds that have been theorized to encourage desistance from crime as they transition to adulthood, and combine partnering and employment roles in a variety of trajectories. Future research in life course criminology searching for social determinants of long-term desistance and persistence in crime need to consider the new schedule of age-graded social bonds experienced by contemporary delinquent adolescents.

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Notes

  1. The effect of marriage on desistance has been demonstrated more consistently for males than it has for females [66] and some important gender contingencies in the effect of marriage on desistance have been found (e.g. [61]). Overall, however, marriage appears to encourage desistance from crime for both males and females ([17]; see also [87]).

  2. For notable exceptions, see Cobbina et al. [26], Huebner et al. [56], and Simons et al. [96].

  3. For notable exceptions, see Bersani et al. [17], Criag and Foster [30]; King et al. [61], Zoutewelle-Terovan et al. [118].

  4. The cost specification of insertions and deletions (indels) relative to substitutions determine, among other things, how often substitutions rather than indels are used. Setting indel costs to greater than half the largest substitution cost tends to prioritize the timing of states while lower costs tend to prioritize their order [70]. Thus, indel costs were set to one since the timing of transitions is of primary interest in the present analyses.

    Other indel cost specifications were tested, but produced generally poorer measures of cluster partition quality and did not produce radically different cluster solutions.

  5. The predicted probabilities in Figs. 3, 4, 5, and 6 are adjusted for the demographic, individual, and background variables described in the “Methods” section using marginal standardization (included in the margins command in Stata 13), which proportionally adjusts each prediction according to a weight for each control variable [78, 100].

  6. Please refer to the Appendix table A1 in the ESM for the full table of estimates from the multinomial logistic regressions that were used to produce these predicted probabilities.

  7. Please refer to the Appendix table A2 in the ESM for the full table of estimates from the multinomial logistic regressions that were used to produce these predicted probabilities.

  8. Please refer to the Appendix tables A3 and A4 in the ESM for the full table of estimates from the multinomial logistic regressions that were used to produce these predicted probabilities.

  9. Although research from the Netherlands suggests that marriage and motherhood combined have little effect on offending; see Zoutewelle-Terovan et al. [118].

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Funding

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, M5J 2J4, Canada

    Timothy Kang

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Correspondence to Timothy Kang.

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Kang, T. The Transition to Adulthood of Contemporary Delinquent Adolescents. J Dev Life Course Criminology 5, 176–202 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-019-00115-6

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