Abstract
Serious youthful offenders are presented with a number of significant challenges when trying to make a successful transition from adolescence to adulthood. One of the biggest obstacles for these youth to overcome concerns their ability to desist from further antisocial behavior, and although an emerging body of research has documented important risk and protective factors associated with desistance, the importance of the neighborhoods within which these youth reside has been understudied. Guided by the larger neighborhood effects on crime literature, the current study examines the direct and indirect effects of concentrated disadvantage on youth reoffending among a sample of highly mobile, serious youthful offenders. We use data from Pathways to Desistance, a longitudinal study of serious youthful offenders (N = 1,354; 13.6 % female; 41.4 % African American, 33.5 % Hispanic, 20.2 % White), matched up with 2000 Census data on neighborhood conditions for youth’s main residence location during waves 7 and 8 of the study. These waves represent the time period in which youth are navigating the transition to adulthood (aged 18–22; average age = 20). We estimate structural equation models to determine direct effects of concentrated disadvantage on youth reoffending and also to examine the possible indirect effects working through individual-level mechanisms as specified by theoretical perspectives including social control (e.g., unsupervised peer activities), strain (e.g., exposure to violence), and learning (e.g., exposure to antisocial peers). Additionally, we estimate models that take into account the impact that a change in neighborhood conditions may have on the behavior of youth who move to new residences during the study period. Our results show that concentrated disadvantage is indirectly associated with youth reoffending primarily through its association with exposure to deviant peers. Taking into account youth mobility during the study period produced an additional indirect pathway by which concentrated disadvantage is associated with goal blockage (i.e., the gap between belief in conventional goals and perceived potential to reach those goals), which was then associated with exposure to deviant peers and indirectly, reoffending behavior. We conclude that the neighborhood effects literature offers a promising framework for continued research on understanding the successful transition to adulthood by serious youthful offenders.
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Notes
We calculate the inverse mills ratio in the following way. First, we estimated a selection model using a group of covariates from the baseline in which the dependent variable is incarceration at wave 7. As a second step, we estimated another model in which the dependent variable is reoffending behaviors measured at wave 8. Then we identified the exclusion criteria which predict the incarceration variable at the selection model, but fail to predict our final outcome of reoffending. As a result of these procedures, we found IQ, parental education, and study site met the requirement of exclusion criteria; youth with a higher IQ (b = −.009, p = .013), a higher level of parental education (b = −.152, p = .003), and are from Philadelphia (b = −345, p = .007) are less likely to be incarcerated at wave 7, but these variables did not predict the reoffending behaviors at wave 8. Following Bushway et al.’s (2007) recommendation, we calculated the inverse mill ratio based upon these variables and included it as a control variable in the models. As a robustness check, we also estimated the VIF (variation inflation factor) to examine whether our IMR introduced any potentially harmful collinearity problems. We found a very moderate level of VIF (Mean VIF = 1.7; Min: 1.10, Max: 3.21).
The issue of sample attrition is another concern for the current analysis (Brame and Piquero 2003). Sample retention for the Pathways project was high at each follow-up, ranging from 84 to 94 % (mean = 90 %) of the full sample (Schubert et al. 2011: 927). As noted, however, our analysis does not include 139 cases that were not interviewed at wave 7. In order to examine any potential bias associated with this sample attrition, we ran a logit model using baseline variables as main predictors in which the outcome is whether a subject was interviewed at wave 7. Our effort to distinguish these groups was not successful, which suggests that any difference between these two groups is not substantial (the explained variance = 0.02). However, the results show that youth who are male or committed more offending behaviors at a baseline were less likely to be interviewed at wave 7. Even though the difference does not appear to be substantial, our results should be interpreted with caution.
Before estimating the final trimmed model, we first estimated a saturated model to examine the relationships between neighborhood measures and our indirect effect variables again (results available upon request). The results are quite similar to the findings presented in Table 2. For that reason, we directly provide the final results for the trimmed model without presenting the new saturated model.
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Acknowledgments
The research was supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (2000-MU–MU-0007), the National Institute of Justice (199-IJ-CX-0053), the National Institute of Drug Abuse (R01 DA019697-01), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, The Center for Disease Control, The William Penn Foundation, The Arizona Governor’s Justice Commission, and the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. We are grateful for their support. The content of this paper, however, is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of these agencies.
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KAW conceived of the study and coordinated and drafted the manuscript. BK participated in the conceptual framework of the study and performed all statistical analysis. LC was a Co-Investigator on the project and participated in the study design and data collection and provided conceptual insight on the study. SHL was the Site Coordinator on the project and participated in the study design and data collection and provided conceptual insight on the study. ARP provided conceptual insight on the study and assisted with drafting the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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Wright, K.A., Kim, B., Chassin, L. et al. Ecological Context, Concentrated Disadvantage, and Youth Reoffending: Identifying the Social Mechanisms in a Sample of Serious Adolescent Offenders. J Youth Adolescence 43, 1781–1799 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-014-0173-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-014-0173-0