Abstract
Our study explores the arrest experiences of two generational cohorts—those entering adulthood on either side of a large shift in American policing. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979 and 1997), we find a stark increase in arrest odds among the later generation at every level of offending, suggesting a decoupling between contact with the justice system and criminal conduct. Furthermore, this decoupling became racially inflected. Blacks had a much higher probability of arrest at the start of the twenty-first century than both blacks of the generation prior and whites of the same generation. The criminal justice system, we argue, slipped from one in which arrest was low and strongly linked to offending to one where a substantial share of Americans experienced arrest without committing a crime.
- © 2019 Russell Sage Foundation. Weaver, Vesla M., Andrew Papachristos, and Michael Zanger-Tishler. 2019. “The Great Decoupling: The Disconnection Between Criminal Offending and Experience of Arrest Across Two Cohorts.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 5(1): 89–123. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.05. Direct correspondence to: Vesla M. Weaver at vesla{at}jhu.edu, Departments of Political Science and Sociology, 338 Mergenthaler Hall, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, MD 22181; Andrew Papachristos at avp{at}northwestern.edu, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University; and Michael Zanger-Tishler at michael.zanger-tishler{at}yale.edu.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
