Criminal Behaviour from School to the Workplace

Untangling the Complex Relations Between Employment, Education and Crime

Frank Weerman, Catrien Bijleveld

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136700606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume focuses on the complex relation between offending and the transition from school to the workplace: how employment and education are related to breaking the law and getting in contact with the criminal justice system. The contributors report results from several large scale and sophisticated studies conducted in the Netherlands that gathered rich data on employment, education and criminal behaviour. Each of the studies focuses on a particular period during the life course and particular risk categories. Taken together, they contribute to our understanding of how getting out of school, getting into a job and doing illegal things are intertwined over the life-course, and how these relations differ with age and gender.

The background of this volume is our interest in the often-studied relation between offending and employment, or more generally, between offending and the transition from school to work, including dropping out, part-time work and joblessness. The available literature casts little doubt that employment and education are indeed related to less crime and offending. However, this relation is much more complex than it appears at first hand.

The volume is primarily aimed at researchers and students in the fields of criminology, sociology and economics. However, it may also be of use for non-academic professionals, in particular policy makers and practitioners in the field of criminal justice, probation/rehabilitation, and youth/schools.

1 Employment, education and crime

A complex field of research

Frank Weerman, Victor van der Geest, Janna Verbruggen and Arjan Blokland

Introduction

Education and employment are key to conventional success. Doing well in school enhances the chances on the job market, and getting a well-paid and satisfying job offers financial possibilities, a social network and a vocational identity. Failure in both areas is often linked to the development of a criminal career: poor school achievement and drop-out are related to delinquency of adolescents and young adults; unemployment and poor job quality to crime among adults (for overviews, see, for example, Gottfredson, 2001, Braithwaite, 1979, Lageson and Uggen, 2013).

However, the relation between employment, education and crime is more complex than it appears at first sight. Several issues need to be taken into account: heterogeneity in background and personal characteristics; the causal direction of the relation between education, employment and crime; effects of different combinations of education and employment histories; differences between demographic categories in the meaning of school and getting a job. As will become apparent, we are actually at the beginning of understanding the links between education, employment and crime. For understanding these, there is a need for studies that simultaneously and longitudinally investigate the effects of education and employment in relation to crime.

This volume is devoted to unravelling the complex relation between offending and the transition from school to the workplace. It combines several studies that address how employment and education are related to breaking the law and getting in contact with the criminal justice system. All contributors report results from studies that were conducted in the Netherlands. These studies are characterized by rich data about employment, education and criminal behaviour, and by the use of multivariate statistical techniques. One part of these studies collected detailed survey or interview data among adolescents and young adults, another part connected large scale sets of administrative data. Each of the studies focuses on a particular period during the life course and a particular set of people (low, medium or high risk). Most studies distinguished between males and females, Dutch and migrant inhabitants or juveniles and adults. Taken together, they provide a holistic understanding of how getting out of school, getting into a job, earning legal money and committing crime are intertwined over the life course, and how these relations differ with age, sex and ethnicity.

Background of the volume: five complicating issues

The development of this volume is grounded in our interest in the often-studied relation between offending and employment, or more generally, between offending and the transition from school to work. Since the mid-nineteenth century, associations between crime and offending on the one hand, and work, unemployment, drop-out, and economic circumstances on the other, have been repeatedly demonstrated. Early studies focused on general statistics, indicating that rising levels of unemployment and economic distress were related to rising levels of crime in society (e.g. Von Mayr, 1867). Later studies revealed that the unemployed were overrepresented in crime and prison statistics (e.g. Braithwaite, 1979, Pirog-Good and Sickles 1986).

Studies using self-report data on (juvenile) delinquency appeared from the 1950s onwards, and provided more evidence for the relation between employment and delinquency (see e.g. Braithwaite, 1979). In the Netherlands, the relation between (un-)employment and crime also received considerable attention. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bonger (1916) pointed towards the macro-relation between economic conditions and crime, and from the 1970s onwards, the link between employment and crime has received considerable attention (e.g. Jongman, 1982, Jongman et al., 1991, Miedema, 1997, Van der Geest, 2011, Van der Geest et al., 2011). Recent studies from the Netherlands offer important improvements over earlier studies, by employing longitudinal datasets and sophisticated statistical methods.

Taken as a whole, the available literature casts little doubt that employment is indeed related to crime and offending. However, establishing an association is only the start of understanding how legal and illegal careers are connected. Several methodological and theoretical issues complicate drawing conclusions, issues that makes this a difficult but also very interesting area of research. We highlight five issues that are of particular interest.

First, people differ in the personal and social resources they possess and the economic opportunities they encounter. As a result, there is heterogeneity among individuals in the probability of obtaining a good education and stable and well-paid jobs. People who have limited cognitive, social or physical abilities, who do badly at school, and people who grow up in adverse circumstances in the family or neighbourhood will have a much higher chance of experiencing problems in the job market, losing jobs, and becoming dropouts. The problem is that many of the factors that are associated with doing poorly on the job market (e.g. low IQ, bad parenting experiences, weak social skills, low self-control), are also related to offending and criminal careers over the life course. This implies that an important part of the association between employment, education and offending may be spurious, caused by underlying factors. In research on crime over the life course, this problem is often referred to as ‘population heterogeneity’, a term borrowed from the economic sciences (e.g. Nagin and Paternoster, 2000). This concept points to the possibility that measured and unmeasured differences in the study population may account for associations between certain events in the life course and the development of criminal careers. Several statistical techniques (e.g. growth curve or fixed-effects modelling) are increasingly employed to overcome this problem, but research is still needed to establish how much of the association between employment and offending is due to population heterogeneity.

A second problem is the intertwinedness of employment and education. Educational factors are important determinants of employment opportunities and economic success, at the same time educational factors are also related to criminal behaviour (see for an overview Gottfredson, 2001, Hawkins and Herrenkohl, 2003). One element of education that may be particularly important is early school leaving or drop-out. This has been repeatedly associated with increased, but also decreased levels of offending (see e.g. Elliott and Voss, 1974, Sweeten et al., 2009). In the long term, lacking a school graduation will seriously deteriorate job opportunities and increase the risk of becoming long-time unemployed. Other educational factors may also underlie employment opportunities as well as the probability of becoming an offender. Poor achievement at school may lead to frustration, rebellion and delinquency, at the same time these make for entry on the job market with low educational levels, limiting the possibilities to obtain stable and well-paid jobs. To make the issue even more complicated, there may be common factors underlying educational factors, employment opportunities as well as offending. It is clear that the study of educational factors is necessary to obtain a proper insight into the relation between employment and offending.

A third problem is the causal ordering of the relation. The association between employment (or education) and offending is usually interpreted as being at least partly the result of causal effects of the former on the latter. However, there are reasons to believe that the causal ordering may be reversed, in the sense that offending affects someone's chances on the job market. The most important reason is that breaking the law may lead to arrest or contact with the criminal justice system, which in turn seriously influences employment possibilities and job quality. Arrest and subsequent incarceration usually lead to the termination of a job: employers often regard contact with the police as reason to fire someone, and having a criminal record may seriously complicate applying for jobs and negatively impacts on chances to be hired. This is not to say that the direction can only be in one way: poor employment opportunities may set in motion a negative spiral in which unemployment increases the chances of offending, which in turn further increase the chances of remaining unemployed (e.g. Western and Beckett, 1999, Estrada and Nilsson, 2012). In research on crime over the life course, such a process is referred to as ‘cumulative disadvantage’ (Sampson and Laub, 1997). Longitudinal research is needed to disentangle the potential negative effects of offending on employment from the effects of employment and unemployment on criminal careers. This causal ordering problem also applies to the relation between educational careers and offending. It is possible that breaking the law and subsequent contacts with the police harm relations with teachers and the possibilities to finish school. This implies that offending during adolescence may not only be the result of educational problems, but that it also may lead to further disengagement from school and potentially drop-out. To complicate the issue even further, population heterogeneity also needs to be included in this analysis, since there may be underlying factors involved in the chances of getting into contact with the police, the chances of being hired or fired, and achievement in and commitment to school.

A fourth issue is the link with age, gender and ethnicity. These demographics may have substantial meaning with regard to the relation between employment, education and offending. First of all, juveniles and adults, males and females, and migrants and non-migrants differ in their involvement in work, schooling and offending (see the Appendices to this volume). This implies that the relation may be more or less pronounced among certain categories of people. But work and education may also have different meanings among demographic categories. For example, having a job is something completely different during adolescence compared to adulthood (see Lageson and Uggen, 2013). In adolescence, and to a lesser extent during early adulthood, going to school, college or university is the norm and working substantive amounts of time implies spending less time devoted to education. Having a job early in life often implies that the educational track is left before graduation. Employment may also have a differential impact for males and females, because working and having a job may have different roles in male and female identities (see e.g. Nordenmark, 1999). In general, men attach more value to and obtain more self-esteem from what they achieve in their jobs, while women attach more value to their personal relationships. On the other hand, females more often have the responsibility for children which means that losing a job may have more devastating effects on their income position and lives. Finally, offending may have different consequences on the job market for different ethnic categories, depending on the social stereotypes that employers may hold about ethnic categories. In short, it will be important to include age, gender and ethnicity in our studies of employment, education and offending to get a nuanced insight in the matter.

The fifth and final issue that we want to mention (but our list is not exhaustive), is the link with historical and societal circumstances. Education and employment possibilities differ greatly between societies and over periods. Only recently in history have higher forms of education become accessible to large parts of society. Only a few generations ago, most people in Western societies limited their education to primary school or received no education at all – in many parts of the world, this situation still holds. Further, the job market has been very dynamic in recent history, with periods of relative prosperity followed by periods of crisis with high levels of unemployment. Adding to this, societies differ vastly with regard to the organization of the job market and welfare systems (e.g. liberal versus socialist states, developed versus underdeveloped countries; see Appendix B). These societal differences and historic changes may impact on the meaning of employment and education and their relation with offending. For example, it is possible that relatively generous social welfare arrangements lead to less negative effects of unemployment on life circumstances, and less need to depend on crime.

The contributions in this volume

The aim of this volume and the workshop that was held in preparation for it, was to bring together relevant Dutch studies on the relation between employment, education and offending. We wanted to focus in particular on the interrelatedness between employment and education. We explicitly aimed to explore differences with regard to age, gender and ethnicity.

Each contribution in this volume aims to tackle one or more of the aforementioned issues. Most of the studies control more or less for the effects of background variables and personal characteristics to account for heterogeneity; some studies use fixed-effects methods to study the effects of employment, accounting for all measured and unmeasured stable differences between persons. The majority of the contributions combine educational factors and employment characteristics to study their effects on behaviour. Several studies account for causal ordering by analysing the effects of employment and/or education on later offending, one study investigates a reversed effect, namely of delinquency on the chances of dropping out of school. The majority of studies investigate differences between demographic categories, in particular between males and females. The final empirical contribution to this volume focuses on historical contexts by investigating the effects of unemployment rates on offending during different periods within the twentieth century.

Research from the Netherlands on employment, education and crime is interesting for an international audience for several reasons, not only because it replicates research that has been conducted elsewhere. In the Netherlands as in other countries, many methodological advances have been made in comparison to earlier studies on this issue. Further, the Netherlands stand out with regard to getting access to administrative data, for example police data on offenders and register data on employment (see Tonry and Bijleveld, 2007). This position offers unique possibilities to link different datasets. In addition, research from the Netherlands offers an interesting opportunity to compare findings about the relation between employment, education and offending, with findings from abroad. Most of the research on employment and crime has been conducted in the Anglo-Saxon countries, in particular the United States, and only a few large scale longitudinal studies have been conducted in European, predominantly Scandinavian, countries (e.g. Schumann, 2003, Schumann et al., 2009, Savolainen, 2009, Andersen, 2012, Estrada and Nilsson, 2012, Skardhamar and Savolainen, 2012). It may be interesting to see whether previous findings from other countries are replicated in the Netherlands, with its own particularities in the job market, own educational system and a more generous welfare system than in many other countries (see both Appendices to this volume).

The empirical chapters that resulted from this project report findings derived from seven different Dutch datasets that include information on offending, employment and/or education. These datasets differ on many aspects: some contain mainly adolescent individuals, young adults or a mixture of both, some are focused on the adult population, and one dataset contains data on several generations of adults, spanning different historical periods. The datasets also differ in whether they are population-based or not: some are samples from particularly high-risk samples of individuals. Most datasets contain information on males and females, and on individuals from various ethnic backgrounds, enabling comparisons between various demographic categories. Some datasets contain primarily information about employment status, others are focused on educational factors, including drop-out and school achievement. Several are particularly well suited to analyse education and employment in combination. An overview of the characteristics of each dataset is provided in Table 1.1. Each chapter investigates one or more pieces of the puzzle on the relation between employment, education and offending, and each chapter can be linked to one or more of the five issues we addressed before.

The volume is structured in the following way. We proceed this introductory chapter by providing an overview of the existing literature: theoretical perspectives and previous research on employment, education and offending, with an emphasis on the five substantive issues. In Appendix A, at the end of this volume, we provide a short overview of the current Dutch educational system, also in international perspective. The Dutch welfare system and job market is sketched in Appendix B; Appendix B also includes information and figures about the Netherlands in comparison to other countries.

The following empirical chapters represent the substantial body of this volume. The chapters are roughly arranged along age periods of the investigated respondents or research subjects. The first four empirical contributions are based on datasets with respondents in the age period of adolescence and early emerging adulthood. These studies focus on school achievements, early school leaving/ drop-out, early working experiences and offending. In Chapter 2, by Ruschoff, Kretschmer, Dijkstra and Veenstra, data from three waves of a large scale survey among adolescents are analysed to investigate the relation between employment and delinquency at different time points during adolescence. Special attention is given to differences between males and females, Dutch and non-Dutch adolescents, and to the relation with socio-economic status. Next, Chapter 3, by Traag, Marie and van der Velden, employs a large representative survey on secondary school students together with administ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Studies in Criminal Behaviour
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the editors
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• 1 Employment, education and crime: a complex field of research
• 2 The development of delinquency in adolescence: employment, gender, SES and ethnicity
• 3 The relationship between school performance, delinquency and early school-leaving
• 4 School, work and delinquency among older adolescents: exploring the consequences of different tracks in education and employment after secondary school
• 5 School, intensive work, excessive alcohol use and delinquency during emerging adulthood
• 6 Pathways to adulthood and the relation between employment, education and criminal behaviour: a latent class analysis
• 7 Educational level, employment, financial support and crime: a longitudinal study of disadvantaged youths
• 8 The effect of unemployment on crime in high-risk families in the Netherlands between 1920 and 2005
• 9 Conclusion and discussion: main insights and remaining questions
• Appendix A The Dutch school system
• Appendix B Employment and the Dutch welfare state
• Bibliography
• Author index
• Subject index