Extracurricular Activity Involvement and Justice System Outcomes

Recent literature on the school-to-prison pipeline has emphasized the lack of empirical knowledge around key independent covariates that impact the pathway from school to criminal legal involvement, and whether that pathway is further impacted by the race of the student (Carter, Venkitasubramanian & Bradshaw, 2020; Barnes and Motz, 2018; Nance, 2016; Welch et. al, 2022). However, a portion of juvenile justice literature consistently finds that the system's response to person’s involved in the system can depend on extralegal factors beyond the severity of that person’s offense and their prior record. For example, prior research consistently concludes that factors such as race, ethnicity and sex are associated with juvenile justice outcomes, regardless of the involved individual’s actual behavior or prior record. Another section of juvenile justice literature is centered on relevant social phenomena at play during the commission of a criminal act. For example, Social Bond Theory (Hirschi, 1969) assumes that individuals have natural inclinations to commit crime, and the reason that they commit crime is because they have weak social bonds to conventional society, others, and goals such as education and employment. Largely absent from the existing literature, however, is an empirical assessment of the degree to which these social forces identified consistently in the literature may not only affect offending behavior of an individual, but also affect the system's treatment of a given individual. The present study argues that elements derived from Hirschi's social bond theory may not only affect offending behavior, but may likewise bias the system, such that peripheral by-products of the social bond, such as relationships and accrued social capital, can act as protective factors guarding youth against harsh treatment in the juvenile justice system. Building on the social bond framework, I argue that increased social capital may be one important byproduct of involvement in conventional activities, and that increased social capital, in turn, provides a buffer against harsh treatment in the system even after controlling for levels of self-reported delinquency. Importantly, researchers have previously found that participation in structured, supervised activities (extracurricular activities) is a valuable way to build connections with pro-social peers and adults. Opportunities for positive social connections may be especially important among youth most at risk for exposure to violence, delinquency, and anti-social behavior (Tolan et al. 2003; Wilson 2012), or for non-white youth. Although researchers have investigated extracurricular activity participation and involvement extensively among youth, most of this research has focused on its connection to academic achievement and other positive outcomes. Empirical investigation of the effect that involvement in extracurricular activities can have on youth, specifically those already involved in delinquency, through expanding positive social connections and social capital, has received limited attention. The proposed work seeks to understand whether involvement in conventional extracurricular activities serves as a buffer against more extensive involvement in the criminal legal system, while controlling for self-reported levels of delinquency. It does so by exploring one main research question: Do youth who engage in similar amounts of delinquency experience different legal system outcomes based on how involved they are in extracurricular activities because of the social capital built as a result of extracurricular involvement? It addresses this question using three waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). In addition to the main research question, analysis will further examine if these outcomes hold constant across activity type, level of involvement, and race. The racial component was examined in two ways, where race can be considered either: a moderator of the relationship between activities and criminal legal outcomes; or a variable whose association with criminal legal outcomes may be partly mediated by extracurricular activity involvement. With a diverse and growing minority population in the United States, exploring how race functions in the relationship between involvement in activities and legal system responses is warranted. Understanding how race functions with criminal legal outcomes and access to extracurricular activities or levels of involvement in extracurricular activities can have policy implications by considering how and to what extent state and local school administrators provide access to extracurricular activities.

Author

• Duhaime Bush, Lauren

• Delinquency
• Extracurricular Activities
• Justice System
• Juvenile

Identifier

hdl:1920/13772

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/13772