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Copyright of Journal of Quantitative Criminology is the property of Springer Science & Business Media B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts)

Methods: I use National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 data and restricted comparison group, individual fixed effects, and sibling fixed effects models to examine residential mobility and temporary housing residence during early adulthood.

Results: I find robust evidence that never-incarcerated individuals with felony convictions experience elevated risk of housing instability and residential mobility, even after adjusting for important mediators like financial resources and relationships. The evidence that incarceration has an additional, independent effect on housing instability is weaker, however, suggesting that the association between incarceration and housing instability found in prior studies may largely be driven by conviction status.

Methods: To address the limitations of the existing empirical literature, a novel localized modeling approach is used that does not require a priori assumptions about the shape of the age-crime curve. With a non-parametric method-B-spline regression, the study models self-report criminal behavior and arrest by sex using age as the independent variable, and its cubic spline terms to accommodate different slopes for different phases of the curve.

Results: The study shows that males and females have parallel age-crime curves when modeled with self-report criminal behavior variety score but they have unique age-crime in the frequency of self-report arrest. Group-based trajectory analysis is then used to provide a deeper understanding of heterogeneity underlying the average trends. The onset patterns by sex are quite similar but the post-peak analyses using the early onset sample reveal different patterns of desistance for arrest by sex.

Conclusions: The study found evidence of relatively early and faster desistance of arrest among females but little difference exists for the variety of criminal behaviors. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Methods: I apply hybrid mixed effects models that disaggregate within- and between person variation to investigate incarceration’s relationship with home ownership and net worth, using National Longitudinal Study of Youth data from 1985 to 2008. I also incorporate a set of mediation models in order to test for indirect effects of incarceration on wealth through earnings, health, and family formation.

Results: My results show that incarceration limits wealth accumulation. Compared to never-incarcerated persons, ex-offenders are less likely to own their homes by an average of 5 percentage points, and their probability of home ownership decreases by an additional 28 percentage points after incarceration. Ex-offenders’ net worth also decreases by an average of $42,000 in the years after incarceration.

Conclusions: When combined with previous research on incarceration, my findings show that incarceration acts as an absorbing status, potentially leading to the accumulation of disadvantage. Although incarceration’s negative effects on wealth accumulation were partially mediated by its relationship with earnings and family formation, incarceration directly affected home ownership and net worth. In most cases, former inmates began with flatter wealth trajectories and experienced additional losses after incarceration.

Methods: Based on nine annual waves of national panel data from the NLSY97, this study uses growth curve and group-based trajectory modeling to examine the dynamic and cumulative prevalence of gang membership, variability in the pathways into and out of gangs, and the correlates of these pathways from ages 10 to 23.

Results: The cumulative prevalence of gang membership was 8%, while the dynamic age-graded prevalence of gang membership peaked at 3% at age 15. Six distinct trajectories accounted for variability in the patterning of gang membership, including an adult onset trajectory. Gang membership in adulthood was an even mix of adolescence carryover and adult initiation. The typical gang career lasts 2 years or less, although much longer for an appreciable subset of respondents. Gender and racial/ethnic disproportionalities in gang membership increase in magnitude over the life-course.

Conclusions: Gang membership is strongly age-graded. The results of this study support a developmental research agenda to unpack the theoretical and empirical causes and consequences of gang membership across stages of the life-course.

Methods: We used longitudinal data on 7916 respondents from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort. Our treatment variable was a dichotomous indicator of whether respondents were arrested as juveniles. Our focal outcomes were combined measures of the values of 10 types of assets, 6 types of debt, and net worth (assets minus debt) at ages 20, 25, and 30. We used propensity score methods to create matched groups of respondents who were and were not arrested as juveniles, and we compared these groups on the outcomes using multilevel growth curve analyses.

Results: Arrested juveniles went on to have lower assets, debts, and net worth during young adulthood compared to non-arrested juveniles. These differences were most pronounced at age 30. The differences were largely explained by educational attainment, weeks worked, and income.

Methods: The history of scaling criminal offending is traced in a detailed literature review focusing on the issues of seriousness, unidimensionality, frequency, and additivity of offending. Modern practice in scaling criminal offending is measured using a survey of 130 articles published in five leading criminology journals over a two-year period that included a scale of individual offending as either an independent or dependent variable. Six scaling methods commonly used in contemporary criminological research are demonstrated and assessed using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979: dichotomous, frequency, weighted frequency, variety, summed category, and item response theory ‘theta’.

Results: The discipline of criminology has seen numerous scaling techniques introduced and forgotten. While no clearly superior method dominates the field today, the most commonly used scaling techniques are dichotomous and frequency scales, both of which are fraught with methodological pitfalls including sensitivity to the least serious offenses.

Conclusions: Variety scales are the preferred criminal offending scale because they are relatively easy to construct, possess high reliability and validity, and are not compromised by high frequency non-serious crime types.

Copyright of Journal of Quantitative Criminology is the property of Springer Science & Business Media B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts)