NCJ Number
145955
Journal
Criminology Volume: 31 Issue: 4 Dated: (November 1993) Pages: 465-491
Date Published
1993
Length
27 pages
Annotation
The cause-and-effect relationship between crime and unemployment was examined.
Abstract
Prior studies have confirmed the notion that, in the aggregate, unemployment leads to crime. At the individual level, however, the direction of causality may be the reverse. For one thing, delinquency typically precedes (un)employment in the life course. Researchers in London, England, tracked a cohort of adolescent white boys through early adulthood. Analysis of individual data indicated that early embeddedness in and continuance of delinquent behavior leads to adult unemployment; further, parental criminality, more than parental unemployment, plays a salient role in the development of early adult criminality. Parental criminal conviction interacts with early adolescent delinquency to produce later adolescent delinquency and, subsequently, adult unemployment above and apart from other factors. Thus it is concluded that youths who are embedded in criminal circumstances can become disconnected from the social mechanisms that facilitate legitimate adult employment. This focus on criminal embeddedness accounts for the fact that the majority of youths, even in the most impoverished settings, grow up to be law-abiding, employed adults. 1 figure, 4 tables, and 53 references