Understanding juvenile delinquency among a sample of urban, high -risk youth: The roles of gender and school poverty in predicting arrest

Much research in crime and delinquency has focused on understanding the risk factors associated with delinquency. However, many past studies have relied on national datasets to examine causes of offending, rather than exploring samples in urban and minority areas, where crime is most prevalent and where policy is overwhelmingly directed. The data used for this research come from the Philadelphia Educational Longitudinal Study (PELS), which followed a random sample of eighth graders into early adulthood. This urban sample comes from a particularly disadvantaged and minority population—those most affected by crime as both victims and offenders. The first two chapters of this dissertation will examine family, school, and peer predictors of offending and recidivism separately for males and females, becoming one of a limited number of large-scale studies to do so. Understanding where gender differences lie in predictors of offending is extremely important for prevention and intervention efforts. The final chapter examines the extent to which school poverty matters in predicting arrest. The context of school is particularly important when examining delinquency among urban, minority youth, since urban schools serving a majority of poor and minority students often have less qualified teachers, lower quality curricula, fewer classroom resources, and lower per-pupil expenditures. These inadequacies are strong correlates of student victimization and delinquency. Results from this study reveal that significant predictors of both timing of first arrest and number of subsequent arrests are almost entirely distinct for males and females. Further, the social control models pursued here did not work well to explain female offending, in particular. These results suggest that important influences of female arrest are missing from the models pursued here and future research would benefit from continuing to investigate gender differences in predictors of offending. When examining the role of school poverty, results indicated that attending high-poverty middle and high schools had a strong independent effect on odds of arrest, controlling for family and peer influences. While the strong effect of school poverty may have been inflated due to unobserved parental, school, and community characteristics, there is enough past research to suggest that school poverty does matter