Economics and Youth Violence

Crime, Disadvantage, and Community

Richard Rosenfeld, Mark Edberg, Xiangming Fang, Curtis S. Florence, Richard Rosenfeld, Mark Edberg, Xiangming Fang, Curtis S. Florence

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780814760598
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814760772
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Conditions
• Index: Economics

How do economic conditions such as poverty, unemployment, inflation, and economic growth impact youth violence? Economics and Youth Violence provides a much-needed new perspective on this crucial issue. Pinpointing the economic factors that are most important, the editors and contributors in this volume explore how different kinds of economic issues impact children, adolescents, and their families, schools, and communities.Offering new and important insights regarding the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and youth violence across a variety of times and places, chapters cover such issues as the effect of inflation on youth violence; new quantitative analysis of the connection between race, economic opportunity, and violence; and the cyclical nature of criminal backgrounds and economic disadvantage among families. Highlighting the complexities in the relationship between economic conditions, juvenile offenses, and the community and situational contexts in which their connections are forged, Economics and Youth Violence prompts important questions that will guide future research on the causes and prevention of youth violence.

Contributors: Sarah Beth Barnett, Eric P. Baumer, Philippe Bourgois, Shawn Bushway, Philip J. Cook, Robert D. Crutchfield, Linda L. Dahlberg, Mark Edberg, Jeffrey Fagan, Xiangming Fang, Curtis S. Florence, Ekaterina Gorislavsky, Nancy G. Guerra, Karen Heimer, Janet L. Lauritsen, Jennifer L. Matjasko, James A. Mercy, Matthew Phillips, Richard Rosenfeld, Tim Wadsworth, Valerie West, Kevin T. Wolff

1

Introduction

RICHARD ROSENFELD, CURTIS S. FLORENCE, XIANGMING FANG, AND MARK EDBERG

Scholars, policymakers, and the general public have long been interested in how economic conditions such as poverty, unemployment, inflation, and economic growth affect public problems, including the level and types of youth violence in a community or society, the focus of the current volume. The connection between macroeconomic factors and youth violence has been referenced or alluded to in much of the literature on this issue. But significant research gaps remain, and opinion is far from settled with respect to the economic factors that are most important and how their impact is manifested in children, adolescents, and their families, schools, and communities. As the United States and other nations continue to confront the economic problems brought on by the 2008–9 Great Recession, these issues remain of utmost importance to researchers, policymakers, and citizens.

In the fall of 2008, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) awarded a contract to the Development Services Group (DSG) to review the research literature on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and youth violence in order to develop recommendations for future research and evidence-based intervention and prevention strategies. DSG convened a panel of research scholars to initiate the literature review. The panel consisted of experts in criminology, sociology, anthropology, economics, public health, and psychology (see appendix). All of the panelists have conducted research on youth violence, aggression, and crime and are research leaders in their areas of specialization.

The panelists and colleagues at the CDC began work on a series of papers based on the literature review and on their own related research programs. Over the next year, the papers were presented and revised at panel meetings and eventually became the chapters of the current volume. In this introductory chapter, we briefly describe the analytic framework used to guide and organize the literature review and the major conclusions of the review. We then discuss the organization of the current volume, summarize the objectives and results of each of the chapters, and consider the implications of the volume for future research on the causes and prevention of youth violence.

Analytic Framework and Literature Review

During the 1990s, Brooks-Gunn and colleagues developed an analytic framework connecting macro-social conditions such as segregation and labor markets to individual developmental outcomes, including physical and mental health, personal efficacy, interpersonal relations, and criminal behavior (Brooks-Gunn, Duncan, and Aber 1997). The framework specifies two key intervening domains that link macro conditions to individual development: neighborhood characteristics and family responses to neighborhood conditions. The framework has proven to be a durable foundation for subsequent basic and applied studies in what has come to be termed the “neighborhood effects” tradition in social research.

We used the Brooks-Gunn framework as a starting point for our own literature review and for shaping the chapters in the current volume. Our first task was to develop an analytic framework to guide our inquiries along the lines of that developed by Brooks-Gunn et al. (1997), but our framework is both narrower in scope and more elaborate in content. In keeping with the objectives of our project, we narrowed the range of macro-social conditions to focus on economic conditions such as poverty, unemployment, economic growth, and wealth inequality. We also narrowed the outcome of concern to violent offending and victimization of children, adolescents, and young adults. But we expanded the mediating domains linking macroeconomic conditions to youth violence to encompass the community (comparable to “neighborhood” in the Brooks-Gunn schema) and situational contexts of youth violence. The situational domain includes family structure and functioning as a major component but also incorporates other relevant micro environments affecting youth violence, such as schools, street gangs, illegal markets, and access to firearms (see table 1.1).

Our framework consists of a temporal dimension (long-term versus short-term impacts of economic conditions on youth violence) that is cross-classified with the intervening domains through which the impacts of macroeconomic factors are manifested: societal, community, situational, and individual. The temporal dimension distinguishes economic conditions on the basis of whether they change gradually or rapidly over time. Some macroeconomic factors, such as levels of wealth inequality, change relatively slowly over time, and their impact on youth violence may occur over many years or decades. Such effects are best captured by studies of long-term changes in economic conditions and violence or by cross-sectional studies that reflect the accumulated changes in economic conditions and violence captured at a single point in time. Alternatively, some factors may have an impact on youth violence only when they reach a critical threshold level, and the effective level may differ across communities. Other macroeconomic conditions, such as unemployment, inflation, or consumer confidence, change more rapidly over time, and their effects on violence can be examined in time-series studies covering shorter time periods.

The second dimension of the framework specifies the domains through which economic factors may influence youth violence, over both the short and long run. Broad economic phenomena, such as a national or global recession, may affect entire societies (column one in the figure). Others, such as concentrated poverty or chronic joblessness, affect some communities more than others (column two). Economic conditions also may influence the situational context of youth violence by, for example, affecting firearm ownership and carrying, the salience of street gangs, and markets for illicit drugs (column three). Finally, the economy may affect individual youths in ways that heighten their risk for violence, for example, through its impact on family functioning, community support resources, illicit drug use, or dropping out of school (column four). The short- and long-run impacts of economic conditions are likely to ramify across multiple domains and may differ depending on the race, ethnicity, or immigration status of the affected youth.

Table 1.1. The Impact of Economic Conditions on Youth Violence: A Multilevel Explanatory Framework

If nothing else, the analytic framework depicted in table 1.1 should convey the complexity of the manifold connections between economic conditions and youth violence. The panel, in order to make its task manageable, decided to focus its attention on four key subdomains through which the impact of economic conditions on youth violence is manifested: families, schools, community resources, and street markets. These intervening contexts were not intended to exhaust the possible connecting links between economic conditions and youth violence, but they do constitute major pathways through which economic factors are likely to influence levels and patterns of youth violence.

The analytic framework proved to be useful for organizing the review and motivating the studies contained in this volume. We recommend continued use of this organizing schema or closely related ones in future reviews intended to summarize prior research and to guide future research on youth violence. The literature review culminated in the following general conclusions:

(1) The research literature on macroeconomic factors associated with youth violence is dominated by cross-sectional studies. Further, results from cross-sectional investigations often are not replicated in existing longitudinal research. Perhaps the best example of such divergent results involves the relationship between unemployment and crime. Cross-sectional research reveals a robust, positive relationship between the unemployment rate and crime, whereas the findings of longitudinal studies are mixed, with some studies finding a negative relationship, others a positive relationship, and others no relationship, particularly between unemployment and violent crime (e.g., Pratt and Cullen 2005). The difference in results could signal a corresponding difference in the short- and long-term impact of unemployment, with cross-sectional studies reflecting the impact on crime and violence of enduring or chronic joblessness and longitudinal research reflecting short-term cyclical effects or their absence. But the greater consistency of the cross-sectional findings also may be attributable to the absence of controls for other conditions that affect both the level of unemployment and violence. In other words, the relationship between unemployment and violence found in cross-sectional research may to some degree be spurious. Future research should adopt both a cross-sectional and longitudinal framework, as in pooled time-series or panel analyses, which may help to better identify the causal consequences of unemployment and other economic conditions for youth violence, across places and over time (see, e.g., Arvanites and Defina 2006; Raphael and Winter-Ebmer 2001; Rosenfeld 2009).

(2) The analytic framework directs attention to a range of potential pathways between macroeconomic factors, the mediating domains, and youth violence. Most of the literature reviewed, however, focuses on the relationship between mediating factors and youth violence (proximal linkages), rather than between macroeconomic factors and the mediating domains (distal linkages) or linkages spanning the full spectrum from macroeconomic factors to youth violence. Greater research attention to how economic conditions affect families, schools, community resources, street markets, and other mediating contexts of youth violence is clearly needed.

(3) The literature under review points to several individual and family-level risk factors for youth violence and to interventions that show promise in modifying those factors. Much less attention, however, has been devoted to interventions at the community level that may reduce rates of youth violence. Moreover, the research literature strongly suggests that the effect of individual and family factors cannot be separated from the surrounding community-level socioeconomic conditions in which they are embedded, supporting a conclusion that individual or family-level interventions, even if “best practices,” will have limited effects unless they are combined with broader community interventions.

The Current Volume

Overall, the literature review constitutes a rich resource for the research community by summarizing the major results of, as well as deficits in, recent research on linkages between macroeconomic conditions and youth violence. It also served as a foundation for the current volume, which reviews prior research and introduces new results pertaining to youth violence across multiple domains of influence and over time. We asked the contributors to address important outstanding research issues that emerge from the literature review and to bring new data and insights to bear on these issues from their own research. The volume is organized in three main parts. The three chapters in part 1 focus on the relationship between changing economic conditions and general crime, violence, and youth violence trends over varying time periods. The chapters in part 2 examine patterns of youth violence and its control in relation to community socioeconomic conditions. Part 3 directs attention to how economic conditions influence individual and family factors implicated in youth violence. The final chapter derives policy and prevention implications from the research overviews and the new findings presented in the previous chapters.

Part 1 opens with a chapter by Shawn Bushway, Philip Cook, and Matthew Phillips that presents new research results on the relationship between short-run fluctuations in economic conditions and changes in homicide, property crime, and suicide rates over a 76-year period. The results replicate and extend those of a now classic paper by Cook and Zarkin (1985). The authors find that economic downturns result in increases in burglary, robbery, and suicide rates; decreases in motor-vehicle theft; and no significant change in homicide rates. An analysis of age-specific arrest rates since 1963 shows basically the same results, except for robbery, which is not significantly related to changes in age-specific arrests. The analysis of arrests indicates that the “procyclical” pattern (crime decreases coincide with economic downturns) for motor-vehicle theft is specific to offenders under the age of 18; no significant results are found for older age groups. The authors view the mechanisms linking cyclical economic change and crime as a “black box” to be filled in by other researchers. The remaining chapters begin to peer inside the black box.

Eric Baumer, Richard Rosenfeld, and Kevin Wolff present new results on how levels of inflation moderate the impact of unemployment on property crime and age-specific homicide rates for a sample of 82 American cities over the period between 1980 and 2009. Controlling for other influences, they find that the effect of unemployment on property crime rates is stronger during periods of high inflation; in fact, no relationship exists between unemployment and property crime during periods of below-average inflation rates. The authors report similar results for the effect of wage levels on homicide rates. These results may hold a clue for why crime rates did not increase during the 2008–9 recession, when inflation rates were at historically low levels. Contrary to expectations, the authors do not find evidence that the level of unemployment insurance benefits or a measure of drug market activity moderates the effect of economic adversity on crime rates. They conclude their chapter with the recommendation that future research on the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and crime rates move beyond simplistic assessments of “main effects” and consider the role of inflation and other conditions in moderating the relationship between crime rates and economic conditions such as unemployment and wages.

Janet Lauritsen, Ekaterina Gorislavsky, and Karen Heimer also present new research findings in their chapter on the relationship between changing economic conditions and rates of serious violent victimization among adolescents and young adults between 1973 and 2005. They compare the effects of unemployment, poverty, and consumer sentiment on rates of youth violence by the gender and race-ethnicity of victims. They find that increases in youth violence are generally associated with increases in poverty and growing consumer pessimism, but not with increases in unemployment. The effects of poverty and consumer sentiment, however, differ somewhat for males and females and youth of differing ages and race-ethnic groups. Like the previous results presented by Baumer and colleagues, these findings indicate that the relationship between macroeconomic conditions and youth violence is not simple and is conditioned by the age, gender, and race-ethnicity of victims.

In part 2 of the volume on the community context of youth violence, Xiangming Fang, Richard Rosenfeld, Linda Dahlberg, and Curtis Florence report new results from a cross-sectional study of the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage and self-reported violent offending among a nationally representative school-based sample of adolescents. They find that the relationship between disadvantage and adolescent violence is nonlinear: Adolescent violence is relatively low in the least disadvantaged neighborhoods, peaks in more disadvantaged areas, and falls off somewhat in the most disadvantaged areas. The authors recommend that policymakers consider these nonlinear patterns when devising interventions to control youth violence.

Robert Crutchfield and Tim Wadsworth present results from their research on youth and adult employment patterns in disadvantaged communities, school performance, and delinquency in a nationally representative sample of adolescents. An important result of this study is that neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage conditions the effect of school performance on delinquency. Among students who live in disadvantaged areas, better grades in school are associated with higher delinquency rates, a pattern opposite to that found for students from more advantaged areas and suggesting that the relationship between school performance and violence involvement is conditioned by the neighborhood opportunity structure. This finding should concern policymakers and violence-prevention specialists and echoes the conclusion from the literature review that interventions to prevent youth crime and violence should be multivalent, encompassing the community as well as the families and schools of disadvantaged youth.

The following chapter by Mark Edberg and Philippe Bourgois considers how the exposure of adolescents to street market contexts (e.g., gangs, drug markets) shapes the connection between violence and identity development—thus increasing the likelihood of violent behavior by youth. Prior research has explored normative aspects of these contexts, particularly a violent “code of the street” (Anderson 1999). The authors, however, focus on the interaction of the street market context as embedded in structural inequality and the adolescent developmental phase of identity formation, concluding that violence comes to represent socially valued personal qualities, which strengthens its connection to positive identity models. The authors also conclude that interventions focusing on the risk factors that contribute to youth involvement in street markets do not sufficiently address the generative dynamic that exists once they are involved—as exemplified by the identity development process. Interventions utilizing a substitution principle are offered as one alternative.

In the final chapter of part 2, by Jeffrey Fagan and Valerie West, attention turns to the response of the criminal justice system to neighborhood violence. To what extent, they ask, do persistently high levels of incarceration depress economic well-being and human capital in disadvantaged and racially segregated communities? In a panel analysis of New York City neighborhoods between 1985 and 1996, a period in which the city’s violent-crime rates both rose and fell sharply, the authors find evidence that high incarceration rates reduce income growth, educational attainment, and work experience in disadvantaged and racially segregated neighborhoods. They recommend targeted micro investment and housing dev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Trends in Macroeconomic Conditions and Youth Violence
• Part II: The Neighborhood Context
• Part III: Child Development, Families, and Youth Violence
• Part IV: Looking to the Future
• About the Contributors
• Index