The effects of education on crime
For more information on this project, please contact Ricardo Sabates.
Crime is a major domain of the wider benefits of learning and education is a potentially large influence on individual propensities to offend and area-level variation in crime rates. Therefore, there are potentially large returns to education investments that can reduce crime.
There is a significant theoretical literature on how school experiences may affect individuals’ propensities to engage in criminal activities. For example, strain theorists argue that the school experience generate delinquency by evaluating youths negatively and that crime may be an individual or collective solution to feelings of frustration or status differentials. Another example is social controls theorists, who argue that schools are an important socializing institution that attempts to introduce children into the institutional system of the country. But the school may induce youths into criminal activities if it fails to reduce social stratification or if it forces students into irrelevant curricula.
What exactly we mean by school experiences that may induce criminal behaviour among the youth remains an empirical question. One possible area, for example, may be school segregation. Segregation may be though to induce crime by perpetuating inequalities, which may reproduce anger and frustration in youths that may lead them into criminal activities. It is also possible that visible school segregation may disable linkages between students and institutions, reduce the likelihood that students will engage with common values which may lead them into crime. It is possible, however, that an increase in segregation will lead to reduce crime if there are already large differences in status among individuals. In other words, if there is an unequal status between groups and desegregation occurs, this may lead to an increase in anger, frustration or uneven competition for limited resources, which may, in turn, increase crime.
But school segregation may not be the only school experience inducing crime behaviour. Also, school segregation has to be identified in terms of ethnic segregation or income segregation. Are there differences between these experiences of segregation on juvenile crime. It may be the case that the level of school deprivation is more important in predicting crime among youths. Therefore, it is not the unevenness of the distribution of children in schools but the experience of poverty and deprivation itself that has a greater effect on crime.
This project uses the variance of school success or measurements of educational inequality in LEAs to predict juvenile crime. This aim is based on previous WBL work that models societal-level measurements, such as social cohesion, as a function of inequality or the spread in education rather than as function of levels of education. Similarly, we will also consider aspects of the variance of income as a determinant of crime. Finally, we introduce residential segregation as a confounder in the analysis to control for possible effects on crime that are not directly related to school experience.
This project considers crime rates for individuals aged 14 to 16 years. We continue to use the Offenders Index Dataset to assess effects of education on crime rates by area using fixed effects and instrumental variable estimation techniques. We use difference sources of data from NOMIS to generate measurements of residential segregation.
