Criminologists increasingly worry about a "school-to-prison pipeline" problem. Such worries are typically inflamed incident to public school districts' typical reaction (or, to some, over-reaction) to tragic episodes of student violence, especially mass-violence. An increasing number of empirical efforts seek to identify and better understand causal mechanisms. To this end, a recent paper by Todd Jones (Miss. St.-econ) and Ezra Karger (Fed. Res.-Chicago), School and Crime, exploits data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and explores "seasonality" patterns.
As it relates to "seasonality" patterns, the paper's main take-away is that juvenile criminal activity in general, and student-on-student crime in particular, largely maps onto the school calendar. More specifically, the paper documents a population-level outcome: across all children—those who are compliers for education-based policies and those who are not—attending school causes an average increase in the likelihood of student-on-student crime. While the overall patter is suggestive, the underlying mechanisms are less so. That is, whether a school's institutional setting itself (e.g., institutional-level policies and practices)--or, for example, that student-on-student crime is simply a function of student density levels--is the critical mechanism remains unclear. The paper's abstract follows.
“Criminal activity is seasonal, peaking in the summer and declining through the winter. We provide the first evidence that arrests of children and reported crimes involving children follow a different pattern: peaking during the school year and declining in the summer. We use a regression discontinuity design surrounding the exact start and end dates of the school year to show that this pattern is caused by school: children aged 10–17 are roughly 50% more likely to be involved in a reported crime during the beginning of the school year relative to the weeks before school begins. This sharp increase is driven by student-on-student crimes occurring in school and during school hours. We use the timing of these patterns and a seasonal adjustment to argue that school increases reported crime rates (and arrests) involving 10–17-year-old offenders by 47% (41%) annually relative to a counterfactual where crime rates follow typical seasonal patterns. School exacerbates preexisting sex-based and race-based inequality in reported crime and arrest rates, increasing both the Black-white and male-female gap in reported juvenile crime and arrest rates by more than 40%.”
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