The Role of Violent and Nonviolent Delinquent Behavior in Educational Attainment

Abstract

Given large variations in the etiology and developmental trajectories of violent and nonviolent delinquency, this study examines whether educational outcomes of violent and nonviolent offenders might differ. In particular, this study attempts to remove environmental influences such as family background and neighborhood effects from the effects of delinquency because these factors are likely to differentially confound the effects of violent and nonviolent delinquency on educational attainment. By exploiting variation within sibling pairs, this study finds that the effects of engagement in violent delinquency on education is driven spuriously by shared family background, whereas the effects of nonviolent delinquency are quite robust to adjustment for family fixed effects. Moreover, relying on fixed effects estimates, this study finds that the effects of engagement in nonviolent delinquent activity on educational attainment occur in part through disruption of educational progress, rather than through institutional responses to student delinquency and social-psychological processes.