PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Vesla M. Weaver
AU  - Andrew Papachristos
AU  - Michael Zanger-Tishler
TI  - The Great Decoupling: The Disconnection Between Criminal Offending and Experience of Arrest Across Two Cohorts
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2019.5.1.05
DP  - 2019 Feb 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 89--123
VI  - 5
IP  - 1
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/1/89.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/5/1/89.full
AB  - 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.