“Why Does Education Reduce Crime?”, 2022-01-20 (; similar):
We provide an unifying empirical framework to study why crime reductions occurred due to a sequence of state-level dropout age reforms enacted between 1980 and 2010 in the United States. Because the reforms changed the shape of crime-age profiles, they generate both a short-term incapacitation effect and a more sustained crime-reducing effect. In contrast to previous research looking at earlier US education reforms, we find that reform-induced crime reduction does not arise primarily from education improvements. Decomposing short-run and long-run effects, the observed longer-run effect for the post-1980 education reforms is primarily attributed to dynamic incapacitation.
…The rest of the paper is structured as follows. §II first discusses crime-age profiles and then outlines a framework where changes in school-leaving ages have scope to shift and alter the shape and structure of crime-age profiles. This is then discussed in the context of existing research. §III describes the data, offers some initial descriptive analysis of compulsory school-leaving laws, and presents the research design used in the empirical work contained here. §IV reports the main results on the impact of dropout age reforms on crime-age profiles. §V provides further discussion and examines evidence on the mechanisms by which dropout reforms reduce criminality. §VI offers conclusions.
…A key feature, therefore, is that while younger individuals may commit some crime, because they are kept in school, there is an incapacitation effect preventing them from engaging in as much crime as those older than the dropout age who have more available time for such activity.6 An increase in the mandatory dropout age will reduce the crime rate among those directly incapacitated in school as a result of the reform. Once the individual reaches the new, higher dropout age, the incapacitation effect will vanish, and if direct incapacitation is the only factor at work, then a higher dropout age alters the crime-age profile for individuals of age less than or equal to the dropout age but exerts no effect for those aged above the new dropout age.
However, a dynamic framework enables an additional effect from incapacitation, which we term dynamic incapacitation. This occurs when the direct incapacitation from being kept in the school classroom causes changes that also affect future crime participation, independent of whether there is any educational value to the incapacitation. For example, suppose being kept in school during the day prevents an individual from being on a street corner dealing drugs. This reduces arrests at the time but also potentially means that the individual leaves school without the criminal record they would otherwise have had. They now find it easier to pursue life as a law-abiding citizen. Put another way, some individuals’ crime onset is stopped by incapacitation, and they never commit crime at a later age. For other individuals who may have already committed crime, the incapacitation reduces their crime intensity during the incapacitation period, and this persists as they get older—the reform acts to reduce their criminal capital accumulation as compared with the counterfactual of no reform. 2004 describe this as follows: “It is possible that criminal behavior is characterized by strong state dependence, so that the probability of committing crime today depends on the amount of crime committed in the past. By keeping youth off the street and occupied during the day, school attendance may have long-lasting effects on criminal participation” (158).
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