Educational Inequality and Juvenile Crime

Download or read book Educational Inequality and Juvenile Crime written by Ricardo Sabatés and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper focuses on the links between educational inequality and juvenile conviction rates for violent crime, stealing from another person, burglary in a dwelling and racially motivated offences. We use area-based data on conviction rates, educational attainment and educational inequality for three cohorts of young people and employ mixed-effect models to estimate the impact of between-cohort changes in educational inequality on conviction rates. Our results show that, above and beyond impacts of absolute access to resources, young people who grow up in school cohorts marked by higher levels of disparity in educational achievement are more likely to commit violent crime and racially motivated offences than those with less disparity. This association was not found for property-related offences. Our results suggest that if governments wish to be tough on the causes of crime as well as on crime itself, it must address issues of relative deprivation.