NCJ Number
84839
Date Published
1979
Length
34 pages
Annotation
Based on data describing 302 delinquent and predelinquent youths who participated in a delinquency prevention program in Philadephia, this analysis provides a description of clients and investigates the relationship between employment and recidivism.
Abstract
The Youth Services Center (YSC) is a community-based delinquency prevention program. Each client is assigned to a caseworker who makes appropriate referrals for clients with special needs and generally supervises clients through frequent contacts. The typical YSC client is also typical of the delinquent population in general. The largely male population comes from broken families, headed primarily by females. Data analysis revealed that youths who received job referrals through YSC were somewhat different than youths who did not receive referrals. The cause of these differences was attributed to organizational selection bias and self-selection bias on the part of youths who obtained jobs. Caseworkers referred more school dropouts to jobs, and the job specialists tended to select youths on the basis of easily observed characteristics, which did not include arrest records. The hypotheses which tested the effects of employment and unemployment on crime recidivism were all rejected. Better measures of relevant variables and more sophisticated tests must be made before finally rejecting a causal relationship between employment and recidivism. Eleven tables and eight footnotes are provided.