Do Changing Connections to Key Social Institutions Influence Crime Propensities, Criminogenic Exposure, and Crime Involvement through Adolescence and into Early Adulthood?

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores how changing social relationships from adolescence to young adulthood are associated with changes in crime propensity and criminogenic exposure, and subsequently crime involvement. This is analysed through participants’ connections to key social institutions—family, school, and work—which shape the social context in which they develop and act. The first part of the chapter explores how changing family and school relationships continue to influence crime propensity and criminogenic exposure up to age 16; while the second part captures the changes that occur, and differences that emerge, in people’s connections to key social institutions after age 16 and how these are associated with patterns of development in their crime propensity, criminogenic exposure, and crime involvement in late adolescence and early adulthood. Overall, these analyses illustrate the continuing association between contemporaneous social relationships and people’s crime propensities and criminogenic exposure, and consequent crime involvement, and how changes in those social relationships are linked to developmental trajectories of crime propensity, criminogenic exposure, and crime.