IQ and Delinquency

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the degree to which police arrest is influenced by an offenders’ level of verbal intelligence. Concomitantly, we examine whether the level of concentrated disadvantage of the neighborhood where the offender resides moderates the effect of verbal intelligence on arrest. To accomplish this, we employed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the extent to which persistent delinquent youths’ self-reported arrests are significantly related to their verbal IQ scores. Furthermore, we also analyzed the interaction of verbal IQ scores and neighborhood disadvantage net of an array of theoretically relevant control variables.