Educational Resources, Racial Isolation and Adult Imprisonment Risk Among US Birth Cohorts Since 1910. Executive Summary

摘要

Most prior research on incarceration rates has explored the effects of macro-level economic, political, and demographic variables, including unemployment, economic inequality, electoral cycles, welfare spending, and race relations. By contrast, we use previously unreleased U.S. census data that includes prison inmates to examine the impact of educational resources (measured as student/teacher ratios) and racial isolation (measured as proportion of white students) in the states where individuals attended elementary and secondary school on their subsequent imprisonment risk as adults. While we could identify no prior research that uses census data to examine connections between state-level educational resources or racial isolation in schools on individual imprisonment risk, there are sound theoretical reasons to expect such links. Prior research has demonstrated connections between a variety of educational variables and criminal behavior and criminal justice outcomes, including imprisonment. Educational variables have also been shown to affect outcomes such as occupational status and earnings, which are in turn likely to affect criminal propensity and contacts with the criminal justice system. In this report we review the connections between incarceration and educational experiences and then consider the two major research questions we raised in the original grant application.