Delayed Adulthood, Delayed Desistance? A Brief Report on Changing Age Schedules of Risky Behaviors

Desistance from the risky behaviors associated with adolescence is linked to entry into adult roles like marriage and employment. Increases in the age of these transitions may delay desistance from risky behaviors. Using population data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Center for Health Statistics, and tabulated data from Monitoring the Future, we chart trends in six problem behaviors—arrests, marijuana use, binge drinking, suicides, homicides, and motor vehicle deaths—between 1975 and 2017. We find delays in desistance from some behaviors. For instance, binge drinking peaked at ages 19–22 in earlier birth cohorts but at ages 23–26 in later birth cohorts. However, other behaviors showed no change in the timing of desistance. Women’s rates approached men’s in binge drinking and suicide, but gender gaps persist across behaviors. Delayed transitions to adult roles have not produced a singular pattern of delayed desistance from problem behaviors.

Substance or Semantics? The Consequences of Definitional Ambiguity for White-collar Research

Objectives: To determine whether different conceptions (Populist, Patrician) and operationalizations of “white-collar crime” produce different substantive conclusions, using the applied case of sentencing in federal criminal court. Method: Federal Justice Statistics Program data are used to identify white-collar and comparable crimes referred for prosecution in 2009 to 2011 that were also sentenced through 2013. Five different operational strategies are used to identify “white-collar crime” and are employed in separate hurdle regressions jointly capturing incarceration and sentence length. Differences in model coefficients and case composition are discussed across definitions. Results: There are differences in the relationship between “white-collar crime” and incarceration both between and within Populist and Patrician conceptions. These differences are most pronounced at the in/out decision but are also present for sentence length. Conclusions: Contradictory findings from past research are largely able to be replicated within a single sample simply by changing the conception and operationalization of white-collar crime used. This demonstrates that debating what is “truly” white-collar crime is not just an exercise in semantics—it is a conceptual and methodological choice that can have dramatic consequences on what (we think) we know about the treatment of white-collar crime in the criminal justice system.

Causes of Aging in the Federal Prison Population and a Comparison to States

The unremitting growth of older inmates in prison populations is one of the most pressing concerns in federal corrections today; however, empirical research on the topic says little about the causes of these changes. This article addresses this gap by applying an established methodology to analyze and quantify the contributions of key factors driving the growth of aging federal prison populations. Specifically, we use data from the Federal Justice Statistics Program (FJSP) to determine how changes to prisoner age at entry, rate of entry, and rate of exit have shaped the prison population over recent decades. Overall, we find that from 1994 to 2004, rapid increases in the rate of prisoner admission explain the majority of growth in the elderly population, but that since 2004, age at admission has been much more important, with longer time served and rate of admission also playing a role. These influences appear to be quite different from those shaping state prison populations. Our results suggest optimal policy responses to aging populations will need to be tailored to their jurisdiction.