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Does Early Adolescent Arrest Alter the Developmental Course of Offending into Young Adulthood?

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Abstract

Adolescent involvement in risky behavior is ubiquitous and normative. Equally pervasive is the rapid decline in risky behavior during the transition to adulthood. Yet, for many, risky behavior results in arrest. Whereas prior research finds that arrest is associated with an increased risk of experiencing a host of detrimental outcomes, less understood is the impact of an arrest on the developmental course of offending compared to what it would have looked like if no arrest had occurred—the counterfactual. This study examines the developmental implications of an arrest early in the life course. The sample (N = 1293) was 37% female, 42% non-white, with a mean age of 13.00 years (SD = 0.82, range = 12–14) at baseline and followed annually for 15 years. Analyses combine propensity score matching and multilevel modeling techniques to estimate the impact of early arrest (i.e., 14 or younger) on the development of offending from adolescence into adulthood. The results indicate that early arrest alters the developmental course of offending in two primary ways. First, early arrest heightens involvement, frequency, and severity of offending throughout adolescence and into early young adulthood even after controlling for subsequent arrests. The detrimental influence of early arrest on the developmental course of offending is found regardless of gender or race/ethnicity. Second, even among youth with an early arrest, offending wanes over time with self-reported offending among all youth nearly absent by the mid- to late-twenties. The findings advance understanding of the developmental implications of early arrest beyond typical and expected offending.

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Notes

  1. The 2004 wave (round 8 interview) is dropped from the analysis. The random subsample responding to self-reported offending questions in this round was reselected in 2005; the sample selected in 2005 continues to answer self-reported offending questions in subsequent waves (confirmed via personal correspondence with NLS User Services). Thus, we use the 2005 subsample to define our analytic sample across all waves.

  2. This alternative approach involved assigning a given number of control observations (neighbor = 10) to the treatment case with the closest propensity score.

  3. Results of MLM prior to PSM (not shown) are consistent with those of Table 3 but the latter are tempered by the PSM. For example, the effect of early arrest on the prevalence of offending declines by more than half (from b = 1.110; se = 0.136 to b = 0.454; se = 0.143) in the matched-groups models.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank John Laub and D. Wayne Osgood for their insights and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

Authors’ Contributions

B.E.B. conceived of the study, participated in its design and coordination, and drafted the manuscript; W.C.J. performed statistical analyses, participated in the interpretation of the data and writing of the manuscript; E.E.D. participated in the conception of the study, modeling approach, and writing of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data Sharing and Declaration

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the National Longitudinal Surveys repository, https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator.

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  1. Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland—College Park, College Park, MD, USA

    Bianca E. Bersani & Wade C. Jacobsen

  2. School of Public Health, University of Maryland—College Park, College Park, MD, USA

    Elaine Eggleston Doherty

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Correspondence to Bianca E. Bersani.

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Bersani, B.E., Jacobsen, W.C. & Doherty, E.E. Does Early Adolescent Arrest Alter the Developmental Course of Offending into Young Adulthood?. J Youth Adolescence 51, 724–745 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-022-01576-7

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