NCJ Number
195783
Date Published
October 2003
Length
51 pages
Annotation
This document discusses the effect of education on participation in criminal activity.
Abstract
There are a number of reasons to believe that education can reduce criminal activity. Schooling increases the returns to legitimate work, raising the opportunity costs of illegal behavior; may directly affect the financial or psychic rewards from crime itself; and may alter preferences in indirect ways, which may affect decisions to engage in crime. The key difficulty in estimating the effect of education on criminal activity is that unobserved characteristics affecting schooling decisions are likely to be correlated with unobservables influencing the decision to engage in crime. Individual-level data on incarceration are used from the Census as well as cohort-level data on arrests by State from Uniform Crime Reports to analyze the effects of schooling on crime. Results showed that additional years of secondary schooling reduced the probability of incarceration with the greatest impact associated with completing high school. Differences in educational attainment between Blacks and whites can explain as much as 23 percent of the Black-white gap in incarceration rates. The biggest impacts of education are associated with murder, assault, and motor vehicle theft. The effect of schooling on self-reported crime showed that estimates for imprisonment and arrest were caused by changes in criminal behavior and not educational differences in the probability of arrest or incarceration conditional on crime. The social savings from crime reduction associated with high school graduation was calculated, resulting in the externality of about 14 to 26 percent of the private return. This suggests that a significant part of the social return to completing high school comes in the form of externalities from crime reduction. 3 figures, 12 tables, 36 footnotes, 37 references, appendix