Understanding the Cycle: Childhood Maltreatment and Future Crime

Abstract

Child maltreatment is a major social problem.This paper focuses on measuring the relationship between child maltreatment and crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health).We focus on crime because it is one of the most costly potential outcomes of maltreatment.Our work addresses two main limitations of the existing literature on child maltreatment.First, we use a large national sample, and investigate different types of maltreatment in a unified framework.Second, we pay careful attention to controlling for possible confounders using a variety of statistical methods that make differing assumptions.The results suggest that maltreatment greatly increases the probability of engaging in crime and that the probability increases with the experience of multiple forms of maltreatment. I. IntroductionChild maltreatment, which includes both child abuse and child neglect, is a major social problem that has been neglected by economists.In the United States, mal-treatment is the leading cause of death from injuries in children older than a year.The death rate among children less than 15 is 2.4 per 100,000 and 1,500 children die every year (Institute of Medicine 1999).These deaths are only the tip of the iceberg.According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (1996), more than a million children are victims of maltreatment annually.In two of the few economic studies to address the issue, Paxson and Waldfogel (1999, 2002) show that abuse and neglect are more common in families of lower socioeconomic status, so that maltreatment likely exacerbates differences in the life chances of rich and poor children.Maltreatment may have many long-term consequences for survivors.This paper focuses on the effect of child maltreatment on crime using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health).We focus on crime because it is one of the most socially costly potential outcomes of maltreatment and because the proposed mechanisms linking maltreatment and crime are relatively well elucidated in the literature.Yet there is still controversy about the extent to which a "cycle of violence" in which child maltreatment leads to future crime has been substantiated (compare with Widom 1989a).Economic models of crime typically focus on the adult criminal's human capital and cost/benefit calculations (Freeman 1999).In contrast, our research offers a glimpse at the reasons why criminal capital is accumulated and suggests that the process may begin in early childhood.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 168 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.