Abstract
Research on criminal offending over the life course is accumulating. However, the research design, length of follow-up, and those studied have varied. More recently, it appears that the transition between adolescence and adulthood has become longer. The scholar Jeffrey Arnett terms this stage of the life course from about age 18 to 25 as emerging adulthood and this reference is continued by the author Christopher Salvatore who is an assistant professor at Montclair State University. His book Arrested Adolescent Offenders is part of the criminal justice recent scholarship series from LFB Scholarly. It examines how the stage of emerging adulthood has had unique age and period effects on recent generations. Specifically, Salvatore argues that emerging adulthood has extended the active period for low-level offenders and created a new type of offender—the arrested adolescent offender (AAO) who must now be considered in future research on the life course.
In the initial chapters, the author describes how an individual can become an AAO by failing to make “on time” life-course transitions. The author notes how changes in culture and society of industrialized countries have contributed to a delay in traditional turning points such as marriage, children, and employment. He shows current statistics suggesting younger generations are postponing such events to later in life and the economy is making it difficult for some to find employment.
Theoretically, the author suggests that these delayed life turning points have an influence on criminal offending. Salvatore makes a good argument for how a consideration of the AAO can be added to Moffitt’s offender typologies of abstainers, adolescent-limited (AL), and life-course persistent (LCP) offenders. He argues that AAOs are simply older AL offenders who fail to make a timely transition to adulthood. The author then suggests that a consideration of AAOs can have implications for life course theory in terms of the role of time and social context, as well as gain greater insight into the relationship between age and crime.
In Chapters 3 and 4, the author goes in depth discussing the data and analytical strategy used to examine AAOs. He uses the in-home survey portion of all three waves of the well-known National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). Positively, this book is the first to use the nationally representative Add Health sample to specifically study how emerging adulthood influences offending. Negatively, changes in the Add Health survey design for Wave 3 meant that the dependent measure of AAO, AL, and LCP offenders was slightly different than that for Waves 1 and 2. Further, the justification for the independent variables used at Wave 3 to represent the traditional turning points of education, employment, and economic stability was somewhat difficult to follow. Salvatore also notes that Add Health provides a purely cross-sectional view at each wave, so future research should use more sophisticated longitudinal designs to consider emerging adulthood.
In the final chapter, Salvatore discusses how key indicators of turning points as well as social bonds had relationships with both low- and high-level offending. He also states that these key indicators had relationships with low- and high-level drug use that were both consistent and inconsistent with his hypotheses. For example, marital status, having children, and military service were not relevant predictors of low or high offending. However, working more hours did lead to lower AAO offending and education did act as a turning point for LCP offenders. The hypothesized relationship in social bonds between job satisfaction and property ownership was not related to AAOs; however, parental attachment and economic stability were related, with religious participation results fluctuating depending on the wave of data used. Further, identifying and separating AAOs from LCPs were useful, as AAOs committed fewer offenses and had lower incidence of both low- and high-level drug use.
Direct testing of a new emerging adulthood stage provides an important theoretical contribution to the field of criminal offending over the life course. Specifically, identifying AAOs provides an interesting addition to Moffitt’s existing taxonomy. Salvatore also finds that by using a more recent data sample such as Add Health, many of the traditional turning points and social bonds as described by well-known life-course scholars are still relevant today.
However, there are a few weaknesses. The book itself is organized and reads very much like a doctoral dissertation. The chapters on methods and findings were somewhat difficult to follow—most notably many of the tables in the findings section were incorrectly numbered (and thus referenced). For example, a table that continued onto two pages was considered and numbered as two separate tables. Also, the appendices were too extensive including a series of models to examine two of the hypotheses that were simply referenced in Chapter 4 as appendix E. Such detail on hypotheses testing is normally examined in the body of the text.
Overall, this book tests a new stage in the life course and type of offender—emerging adulthood and the AAO. It adds to the body of knowledge on the subject of the life course and is a good reference for those interested in the area of emerging adulthood today.