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Criminal Justice Contact Across Generations: Assessing the Intergenerational Labeling Hypothesis

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Abstract

Purpose

The present study assesses the intergenerational labeling hypothesis and examines whether the relationship between a child’s involuntary contact with the police and subsequent offending depends on parental arrest history (and its timing in the life course of the child) and parent sex.

Methods

Using data from 312 parent–child dyads from the Rochester Youth Development Study and Rochester Intergenerational Study, generalized linear regression models estimate the main and interactive effects of a child’s involuntary contact and parental arrest history on subsequent delinquency as well as potential mechanisms for deviance amplification.

Results

Main effects are consistent with labeling theory and moderation analyses reveal that the impact of involuntary contact on subsequent delinquency depends on parental arrest history. More specifically, contact with the police on subsequent offending is greater when the focal parent has an arrest history, regardless of when the most recent arrest occurs in the life course of the child. However, some differences in the magnitude of the exacerbating effect of recent parental arrest emerged. Results also speak to potential mechanisms across mother–child and father–child dyads with respect to deviance amplification.

Conclusions

This research supports the life-course principles of “linked lives” and “timing in lives” and their application to labeling theory in an intergenerational context. To reduce deviance amplification, special attention should be paid to youth who experience a police contact in the context of a parental arrest history.

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Notes

  1. Theoretically, the contingent effects of official intervention on subsequent crime have been discussed in at least two extensions or modifications of labeling theory. Braithwaite’s [22] reintegrative shaming theory argues that disintegrative shaming that excludes the offender from the community is likely to result in more crime, while reintegrative shaming, where the community actively tries to forgive and accept the offender back in the community, is likely to reduce future offending. In addition, Sherman’s [93] defiance theory argues that perceptions of unfairness in the sanctioning process generate defiance and increase the probability of more crime. We elaborate on Hagan and Palloni’s [53] work in a later section.

  2. There are a number of other mechanisms that might explain the continuity of criminal behavior across generations. Farrington [43, 44] identifies six reasons for intergenerational continuity in offending. He suggests that both parent and child are exposed to the same risk factors; therefore, there is similarity in criminal behavior. On the other hand, those risk factors may actually mediate the relationship between parents’ involvement in crime and increase the likelihood the child will engage in similar behaviors. Farrington also recognizes the possibility of assortative mating, suggesting that criminal mothers and fathers are likely to mate with another criminal, placing the child in a particularly precarious position. Social learning may play a role as well, whereby children learn or mimic the behavior of their parents. Finally, Farrington suggests that law enforcement agents may be particularly vigilant in surveilling children of convicted felons, thereby increasing the risk of arrest.

  3. The present study draws most heavily on this line of reasoning. However, another avenue that leads to similar predictions is what Hagan and Paolloni (1990) refer to as “structural or imputation processes”, where criminal justice system actors reproduce problem outcomes through treatment of each generation (p. 266). Along these lines, Murray et al. [77] suggest examining whether youth of convicted parents are subject to procedurally unjust or predjudicial experiences as well as distributive injustice, each of which may promote greater negative consequences stemming from a contact with the criminal justice system. Unfortunately, we do not have any measures which speak to procedural or distributive injustice related to involuntary contacts with the police among the children in our sample. As a result, we suggest this is an important area for future research.

  4. Hagan and McCarthy [52] found evidence supporting deleterious consequences of intergenerational labeling for males but not females. Females who lived on the street and had a father who was previously arrested did not experience a differential increase in street delinquency after being charged with a crime compared to females who lived on the street who were charged with a crime but did not have a father with an arrest history

  5. This gap is closing in recent decades due to the rise of dual-earner families, but mothers still spend more time parenting than fathers ([80]; [70, 4])

  6. Due to sample size limitations, we are unable to examine the intergenerational labeling hypotheses proposed for parent–child dyads across both parent and child gender.

  7. Of the 539 G2–G3 dyads, 122 G2–G3 dyads were not included in the final sample because the G3 was not age 17 by 2017. We lost 64 G2–G3 dyads because we did not have full arrest history information for the G2. Additionally, 22 G2–G3 dyads were removed from the sample because G3 participation in RIGS was intermittent during adolescence and we did not have full information about arrests from ages 14 to 16 and we excluded an additional 19 G2–G3 dyads because we had no information on baseline levels of offending. We re-estimated all models including those subjects for whom we did not have baseline levels of offending and the results were the same in direction and significance.

  8. Frequently, variety scores are used in lieu of frequency measures given the respondents may not be able to accurately indicate the number of times that each individual act has been committed (e.g., [78, 81]), and a variety score is viewed an adequate proxy for the frequency of offending. However, for the purposes of this research, a frequency score is used given that it is a more sensitive measure of delinquent behavior among extreme groups of offenders [39] and it can more accurately capture change in rates of offending, which includes less serious offenses, over time [13, 101]

  9. Given our interest in the change in offending rate as a result of an involuntary police contact, we examine the treatment of an involuntary police contact after we are able to create a measure of baseline offending at age 13. Notably, only a handful of G3s (< 5) self-reported arrest prior to the age of 14.

  10. Official records of arrest were compared with self-report records of arrest in waves 2–12. Due to question wording in waves 2–9 of RYDS, more subjects reported involuntary contact with the police than is indicated by official arrest records because subjects were asked whether or not they had been arrested or picked up by the police in a single question through wave 9. We chose to focus on official arrest experiences given that these formal experiences likely will carry the greatest stigma and negatively affect the next generation. Moreover, it also ensures consistency in measurement because G2s were only queried about arrest experiences in waves 10–14 of RYDS and in RIGS.

  11. We attempted to create separate late childhood (ages 6–10) and early adolescence (ages 11–13) categories, but too few G2s experienced their most recent arrest between child ages 6 to 10 (< 1%) to allow for these two unique categories of most recent arrest.

  12. Achen [1] and Haynie and Osgood [55] note that including a lagged dependent variable in some cases is too strong of a control for selection factors, resulting in type II errors for the covariates in the model. Therefore, all models were re-estimated without the lagged measure of offending. The results were the same in direction and significance.

  13. Through bivariate analyses, we explored whether parental deviance should be measured when G2 was an adolescent or whether more recent parental deviance was related to offspring behavior. Significant bivariate correlations (see Appendix) revealed that parental deviance in adolescence was related to child offending behavior and not recent parental deviance. Therefore, we only retained parental deviance during their own adolescence

  14. For the G2 father–child dyad sample, the largest variance inflation factor among covariates was 2.21. For the G2 mother–child dyad sample, the largest variance inflation factor among covariates was 2.36

  15. Given concerns that the models presented may be oversaturated, we re-estimated all models and only included covariates in the model as controls if there was a significant bivariate correlation between the covariate, outcome, child involuntary contact with the police, and/or parent arrest history (child prior offending, child sex, financial assistance, conventional values, gang membership, peer delinquency, unstructured socializing with peers, school commitment, supervision, attachment to mother, community arrest rate, and infrequent contact G2). The results were the same in direction and significance and are available from the lead author upon request. Therefore, we opted to present the fully saturated models in order to preclude concerns regarding omitted variable bias

  16. Additional analyses were performed to determine the full extent of nesting in the RIGS data by age of parent at G3 birth or child year of birth. The intraclass correlation using either specification for the higher level of analysis was less than 0.05. Therefore, we opted to cluster the standard errors by the G2 age at birth. It should be noted that G2’s age a birth is strongly correlated with G3 year at birth (r = 0.95).

  17. We used to following formula by Brame et al. [23] to test whether the coefficients were significantly different among G2 father–child dyads and G2 mother–child dyads: \( z=\frac{b_1-{b}_2}{\sqrt{{\mathrm{SE}}_{b_1}^2}+{\mathrm{SE}}_{b_2}^2} \).

  18. Given that the effects of all control variables in the analyses where parental arrest is divided by timing in the life course of the child were the same in direction and significance to the models presented in the Appendix where parental arrest history is represented with one binary measure, we opted not to display the results of the entire models in the Appendix in order to save space. However, the full set of results is available from the lead author upon request.

  19. Due to the limited sample size and complexity of the path analysis that would be estimated, including interaction terms and clustering standard errors by G2’s age at birth, we were unable to formally assess mediation

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Acknowledgments

Support for the Rochester Youth Development Study has been provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (R01CE001572), the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (2006-JW-BX-0074, 86-JN-CX-0007, 96-MU-FX-0014, 2004-MU-FX-0062), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (R01DA020195, R01DA005512), the National Science Foundation (SBR-9123299), and the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH56486, R01MH63386). Work on this project was also aided by grants to the Center for Social and Demographic Analysis at the University at Albany from NICHD (P30HD32041) and NSF (SBR-9512290).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminal Justice, University of Texas at San Antonio, 4.220 Durango Building, 501 W. Cesar Chavez Blvd., San Antonio, TX, 78207, USA

    Megan Bears Augustyn

  2. Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Jeffrey T. Ward

  3. Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 32611-7330, USA

    Marvin D. Krohn

  4. Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Beidi Dong

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Correspondence to Megan Bears Augustyn.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 5 Individual items in variables/scales
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Table 6. Correlation Matrix
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Table 7 Full model results for negative binomial regression models predicting offending
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Table 8 Negative binomial regression models examining if parental arrest conditions affect child arrest on change in rate of offending when accounting for child deviant values at age 17
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Augustyn, M.B., Ward, J.T., Krohn, M.D. et al. Criminal Justice Contact Across Generations: Assessing the Intergenerational Labeling Hypothesis. J Dev Life Course Criminology 5, 137–175 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-019-00118-3

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