Poverty, Government Assistance, and Juvenile Delinquency
Open Access
- Author:
- Yetter, Alyssa Marie
- Graduate Program:
- Sociology
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 06, 2018
- Committee Members:
- Jeremy Staff, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jeremy Staff, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Michelle Lynn Frisco, Committee Member
Holly Nguyen, Committee Member
Eric Plutzer, Outside Member - Keywords:
- Delinquency
Poverty
Government Assistance - Abstract:
- Despite a substantial body of sociological research regarding the relationship between poverty and crime, an important element of the lives of America’s poor remains understudied. Millions of Americans receive government benefits through programs such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, yet relatively few studies have examined the association between these programs and criminal behavior. Of the existing studies, the majority documents a negative, macro-level association between welfare payments and crime rates, but these findings are not robust. Furthermore, individual-level studies find negative, null, and positive associations between government benefits and criminal behavior. This dissertation seeks to contribute to this body of literature in three key ways. First, I expand the individual-level literature to examine the association between family receipt of government benefits and adolescent delinquency. Second, I closely examine the interplay between poverty and government benefits. Do benefits mediate or moderate the association between poverty and delinquency? Finally, I explicitly measure two of the key theoretical concepts that prior work has used to link benefits to delinquency. No prior study has empirically tested for mediation by theoretical variables. My findings reveal that there is a positive bivariate association between family receipt of government benefits and adolescent delinquency, violence, and property offending. However, this association is not robust to the inclusion of control variables. In other words, factors that influence selection into benefits, and not benefits themselves, are associated with delinquency. Additionally, I examine three different measures of poverty, and I find inconsistent evidence of a poverty-delinquency link. In fully controlled models, poverty is inversely associated with delinquency, but is not associated with violence or property offending. A measure of persistent poverty is not associated with any of the delinquency measures, while moving into poverty between birth and age 9 is negatively associated with all three delinquency measures. Furthermore, receipt of government benefits does not mediate or moderate the association between poverty and delinquency. I next focus on examining the association between measures of key criminological theories, strain and attachment, and government benefits. I find that families that receive government benefits are more likely to have experienced consistently high or increasing levels or strain, rather than decreasing levels of strain. Regarding parental attachment, there is no statistical association between receipt of government benefits and changes in adolescents’ supervision by their parents. However, benefits receipt is negatively associated with consistent or increasing levels of communication between parent and child, compared to decreasing communication. Contrary to theoretical expectations, neither strain nor parental attachment mediates the observed association between benefits and delinquency. In sum, these findings provide evidence that, as designed, government benefits are disbursed to some of the most disadvantaged in our society. The selection process into receiving benefits is complex and difficult to capture, but including a set of selection variables accounts for the bivariate association between benefits receipt and delinquency. Furthermore, it appears that government benefits do not decrease family levels of strain, as designed, but they may decrease some forms of parental attachment, as some feared. Continued examination of the associations between government benefits and key