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When Your School is in a ‘Rough’ Neighborhood: What Can Shield Youth from Crime and Delinquency?

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Abstract

Youth spend much of their time socializing and hanging out with friends, as well as engaging in extracurricular activities, in areas surrounding their schools. Additionally, many studies document a criminogenic effect of schools on the surrounding neighborhood. Yet little is known about how the structural characteristics of those areas shape adolescent involvement in criminal and delinquent behavior. Using recent data drawn from surveys of adolescents in three major U.S. cities, the American Community Survey, and the US Census, we analyze (1) the effects of school neighborhood contexts on adolescent crime and (2) the extent to which individual propensity (i.e., moral beliefs and self-control) moderates the effects of the school neighborhood context. We find that concentrated disadvantage and ethnic heterogeneity of the school area impact delinquent behavior only among youth with certain moral beliefs. Our findings highlight the need to identify the conditions under which social context matters and to focus on different types of neighborhoods beyond residential areas.

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Notes

  1. In our sample, roughly 64% of the students reported they do not live in the same neighborhoods where their schools are located.

  2. Importantly, local communities are involved prior to each decennial census in an effort to ensure that census tracts map onto meaningful neighborhood areas, taking into account changes in the population and physical landscape.

  3. The pattern of results when excluding delinquent friends as a control variable was consistent with the main findings.

  4. We ran sensitivity analysis with group-centered individual moral beliefs and self-control as well as controlled for L2 cluster means of morality and self-control to partial out the pure L1 effect. These results were consistent with our main models.

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Funding

This research was funded by the NSF grants: awards #2001727 and #1419588.

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  1. Anastasiia Timmer and Rachel Lautenschlager contributed equally to the manuscript.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology and Justice Studies, California State University, Northridge18111 Nordhoff St, Northridge, CA, 91330, USA

    Anastasiia Timmer

  2. Department of Sociology & Criminology, University of Denver, Sturm Hall, Room 442, Denver, CO, 80208, US

    Rachel Lautenschlager

  3. Department of Sociology and Criminology, University of Miami, 5202 University Drive, Merrick Building, Coral Gables, FL, 33146, US

    Olena Antonaccio

  4. School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, 425 Churchill Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA, 02115, US

    Ekaterina V. Botchkovar

  5. School of Public Affairs, University of Colorado, 1380 Lawrence St., #500 Denver, Denver, CO, 80217-3364, US

    Lorine A. Hughes

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  1. Anastasiia Timmer
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Timmer, A., Lautenschlager, R., Antonaccio, O. et al. When Your School is in a ‘Rough’ Neighborhood: What Can Shield Youth from Crime and Delinquency?. Am J Crim Just 49, 201–229 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-023-09748-2

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