The Effect of School Discipline on Offending across Time

Abstract

Despite decreases in offending and victimization in schools across the United States, many schools continue to use exclusionary discipline. Although school punishment has been tied to a variety of negative outcomes, the link between suspension and offending remains unclear. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this study examines the extent to which school punishment contributes to within-individual increases in offending across time and/or amplifies offending between-individuals. Results of a series of cross-lagged dynamic fixed-effects panel models reveal that school suspensions contribute to within-individual increases in offending. This relationship remains even when accounting for the effect of baseline levels of offending on future offending. Further, repeated suspensions amplify offending differences between-individuals.

Keywords:

• School punishment
• discipline
• deviance amplification
• life-course

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We used both the transformed and untransformed measure in the analysis. The substantive results were identical, but the logged measure produced models that fit the data more closely. As a result, we report results using the logged measure.

2 At wave 1, respondents were asked if they had been suspended within the last year.

3 We do not include wave 4 suspensions in this category as our outcome variable in these models is change in offending between wave 3 and wave 4. Thus, including wave 4 suspensions would result in a violation of temporal ordering.

4 NLSY97 researchers discuss the psychometric properties of this measure in the NLSY97 codebook and note that this measure has strong predictive validity.

5 Being in a gang and having friends in a gang could present issues of multicollinearity. We examined the relationship between both measures and the correlation was very low (r = .092) suggesting having friends in a gang, and being in a gang, are not highly correlated in these data.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by the Center for Family and Demographic Research, Bowling Green State University, which has core funding from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD050959).

Notes on contributors

Thomas J. Mowen

Thomas J. Mowen is in the Department of Sociology at Bowling Green State University. His research examines the effect of punishment on youth and family outcomes and the role of family within the process of reentry. His recent research has appeared in Criminology, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.

John J. Brent

John J. Brent is in the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University. His research is primarily focused on discipline and punishment, the cultural and structural dynamics of crime and crime-control, and how institutions create and perpetuate inequalities. His recent work has appeared in Punishment & Society, Criminal Justice and Behavior, and Youth Justice.

John H. Boman

John H. Boman, IV is in the Department of Sociology at Bowling Green State University. His research interests include peer effects on crime, developmental and life-course criminology, and reentry. His recent work has appeared in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, and Crime & Delinquency.