Criminal Justice System Processing and Victimization: Results from a Longitudinal Study of Males and Females

ABSTRACT

There has been a great deal of interest in understanding the etiological underpinnings to victimization. This body of research has uncovered a list of risk factors that have been consistently tied to victimization. One of the more consistent results is that criminal offenders are at-risk for being victimized. The current study expanded on this finding by examining whether four measures of being processed through the criminal justice system (i.e., arrest, conviction, probation, and incarceration) were related to multiple measures of victimization in adolescence and adulthood. To do so, data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) were analyzed. The results revealed consistent and statistically significant associations between the criminal justice processing variables and the victimization measures for both males and females even after controlling for self-reported criminal and delinquent involvement. We conclude by contextualizing the results and offering suggestions for future research in this area.

KEYWORDS:

• Add Health
• adolescence
• adulthood
• crime
• offender
• victimization

Acknowledgments

Wave VI of Add Health is supported by two grants from the National Institute on Aging (1U01AG071448, principal investigator Robert A. Hummer, and 1U01AG071450, principal investigators Allison E. Aiello and Robert A. Hummer) to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Co-funding for Wave VI is being provided by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research, and the NIH Office of Disease Prevention. The content of this paper/presentation is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Add Health was designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The project was funded by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development from 1994–2021, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. Add Health is currently directed by Robert A. Hummer; it was previously directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris (2004–2021) and J. Richard Udry (1994–2004).

Disclosure statement

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