Declines in Crime and Teen Childbearing: Identifying Potential Explanations for Contemporaneous Trends

Objectives

The previous 25 years have witnessed remarkable upheavals in the social landscape of the United States. Two of the most notable trends have been dramatic declines in levels of crime as well as teen childbearing. Much remains unknown about the underlying conditions that might be driving these changes. More importantly, we do not know if the same distal factors that are responsible for the drop in crime rates are similarly implicated in falling rates of teen births. We examine four overarching potential explanations: fluctuations in economic opportunity, shifting population demographics, differences in state-level public policies, and changes in expectations regarding health and mortality.

Methods

We combine state and year-specific data from existing secondary sources to model trajectories of violent crime and teen fertility over a 20-year period from 1990 to 2010 using simultaneous fixed-effects regression models.

Results

We find that 4 of the 20 predictors examined—growth in the service sector of the labor market, increasing racial diversity especially among Hispanics, escalating levels of migration, and the expansion of family planning services to low-income women—offer the most convincing explanations for why rates of violent crime and teen births have been steadily decreasing over time. Moreover, we are able to account for almost a quarter of the joint declines in violent crime and teen births.

Conclusions

Our conclusions underscore the far reaching effects that aggregate level demographic conditions and policies are likely to have on important social trends that might, at first glance, seem unrelated. Furthermore, the effects of policy efforts designed to target outcomes in one area are likely to spill over into other domains.

     

Racial Inequality,Ethnic Inequality,and the System Involvement of At-Risk Youth: Implications for the Racial Invariance and Latino Paradox Theses

Drawing from the inequality and crime, racial invariance, and Latino paradox literatures, the effects of inequality on youth reoffending are examined. Specifically, hierarchical logistic regression models are estimated to determine: (1) whether racial and ethnic inequality have similar contextual effects on the continued delinquent behavior of at-risk youth and (2) whether these effects are specific to black or Latino/a youth residing in Maricopa County, Arizona (N = 13,138). Findings suggest that racial inequality increases reoffending while ethnic inequality decreases reoffending. Additionally, Latino/a youth are less likely to reoffend in areas characterized by high income and racial inequality. Structural theories of crime should continue to account for the importance of culture and the resilient responses employed by Latinos/as living in criminogenic environments.     

The Neglected Strata: States in the City-Federal Politics of Malaysia

Another version of this paper was prepared for Conference on"The Politics of Intergovernmental Relations in Federal Systems:Urban Perspectives," Center for the Study of Federalism, TempleUniversity, Philadelphia, August 26–28, 1973. In revisingthis paper, I am indebted to Dorothy and James Guyot for theirperceptive and helpful suggestions.     

Low self-control and coworker delinquency: A research note

Since the publication of Gottfredson and Hirschi [A General Theory of Crime. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990], a large amount of research has shown a link between low self-control and delinquency. Some research has revealed that low self-control has not been able to account for the strong effects of peer delinquency on delinquency. Criminological literature has, until recently, neglected the interactional relationship between low self-control and delinquent peers in predicting delinquency. This study used a sample of employed high school seniors to assess the interaction between low self-control and coworker delinquency on occupational delinquency. Regression analyses indicated that the interaction term was a strong predictor of occupational delinquency, even after controlling for several established predictors of delinquency.