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The second chapter analyzes the influence that juvenile offenders serving time in the same correctional facility have on each other's subsequent criminal behavior. The analysis is based on data on over 8,000 individuals serving time in 169 juvenile correctional facilities during a two-year period in Florida. To control for the non-random assignment to facilities, we include facility fixed effects, thereby estimating peer effects using only within-facility variation over time. We find strong evidence of peer effects for various categories of theft, burglary, and felony drug and weapon crimes; the influence of peers primarily affects individuals who already have some experience in a particular crime category.

Lastly, the third chapter analyzes the impact of juvenile arrest, charge, conviction, and incarceration on an individual's propensity to graduate high school. Using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I control for a large set of observable characteristics that are likely to be correlated with an individual's interactions with the justice system and his education outcomes. I also use the sample of individuals from multiple respondent hou seholds to control for unobservable household level characteristics. The findings suggest that arrest and incarceration when age 16 or younger have a significant negative effect on an individual's propensity to graduate high school; however, charge and conviction do not play a significant role in an individual's education outcomes over and above the effect of arrest.