Does substance use play a role in gender differences in residential independence and returns to the parental home?

Young adults are co-residing with their parents at higher rates now than in the past, and recent research has explored the correlates of both leaving and subsequently returning to the parental home. Of relevance here, females tend to leave home earlier than their male counterparts, and research finds that drinking and drug use are also linked to residential transitions. This research note explores if substance use during adolescence and young adulthood plays a role in gender differences in home-leaving and home-returning. We find that marijuana use plays a role in both home-leaving and home-returning, with adolescent females who use marijuana the most at risk for early exits from home, and marijuana using males the most at risk for home-returning.

Criminal thinking shifts among male prisoners participating in a cognitive-based education programme.

BACKGROUND: Many prisoners rationalise criminal behaviour, and this type of thinking has been linked to recidivism. Correctional programmes for modifying criminal thinking can reshape how offenders view themselves and their circumstances. AIM: Our aim was to test whether participation in a cognitive-based curriculum called Steps to Economic and Personal Success (STEPS) was associated with changes in criminal thinking. METHODS: The STEPS curriculum is delivered in 15 video-based facilitated classes. A pre-intervention/post-intervention survey design was applied to 128 adult male prisoners who completed the programme. Criminal thinking was measured by the Texas Christian University Criminal Thinking Scale, a self-report instrument with the six domains: entitlement, justification, power orientation, cold heartedness, criminal rationalisation and personal irresponsibility. RESULTS: Participants had lower scores in most of the criminal thinking domains after the intervention than before, with largest reductions in justification and power orientation. CONCLUSION: Findings provide evidence that attitudes to crime can be changed in a correctional setting, and the programme under study shows promise as an effective intervention for changing these attitudes among prisoners. Future research should build on these findings to examine whether and how such changes are related to desistance from offending behaviours. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Into the Red and Back to the Nest? Student Debt, College Completion, and Returning to the Parental Home among Young Adults.

Rising student debt has sparked concerns about its impact on the transition to adulthood. In this paper, we examine the claim that student debt is leading to a rise in "boomeranging", or returning home, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 Cohort and discrete time event history models. We have four findings. First, student loan debt is not associated with boomeranging in the complete sample. However, we find that the association differs by race, such that the link between student debt and returning home is stronger for black than white youth. Third, degree completion is a strong predictor of returning home, whereby those who fail to attain a degree have an increased risk of boomeranging. Fourth, young adult role transitions and socioeconomic well-being are associated with boomeranging. Findings suggest that rising debt has created new risks, and may reproduce social inequalities in the transition to adulthood.

On the move: Incarceration, race, and residential mobility.

The present study examines the relationship between incarceration and post-prison residential mobility. In spite of recent research examining the residential context following incarceration, we know little about if or how incarceration affects individual patterns of residential mobility. This study starts to fill this gap in knowledge by drawing on nationally representative data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79). I find that individuals with a history of incarceration are more likely to move after prison than they are before prison. This relationship holds even after accounting for various time-varying and time-stable sources of spuriousness, including other known correlates of mobility. Additional analyses suggest that this effect is strongest early in the reentry period, and that there exists important racial variation in the relationship between incarceration and mobility. These results imply that, while housing stability is an important feature of successful prisoner reentry, incarceration contributes to larger patterns of residential instability.

Why are crime victims at risk of being victimized again? Substance use, depression, and offending as mediators of the victimization-revictimization link.

Using three waves of data from 5,165 male and 5,924 female teenagers surveyed in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study tested whether drug use, alcohol use, depression, and offending mediate the link between a serious violent criminal victimization and a subsequent serious violent revictimization. Results indicated that victimization at Wave 1 significantly predicted changes in violent offending, delinquency, and drug use at Wave 2, even controlling for all other lagged mediators. Violent offending emerged as a robust and consistent mediator of the victimization-revictimization link for males. For females, all the mediators together produced a significant and large indirect effect that reduced the direct effect of prior victimization to nonsignificance, but no one single mediator was significant. This study demonstrates that revictimization is partially the result of behavioral changes following victimization. The fact that mediation between victimization and revictimization occurred through a cluster of changed behaviors and moods suggests that the impact of victimization is greater for females than males. This evidence that victimization changes behavior and increases risks and that these risks differ by gender has implications for both mental health care and law enforcement.

Racial Variation in the Effect of Incarceration on Neighborhood Attainment.

Each year, more than 700,000 convicted offenders are released from prison and reenter neighborhoods across the country. Prior studies have found that minority ex-inmates tend to reside in more disadvantaged neighborhoods than do white ex-inmates. However, because these studies do not control for pre-prison neighborhood conditions, we do not know how much (if any) of this racial variation is due to arrest and incarceration, or if these observed findings simply reflect existing racial residential inequality. Using a nationally representative dataset that tracks individuals over time, we find that only whites live in significantly more disadvantaged neighborhoods after prison than prior to prison. Blacks and Hispanics do not, nor do all groups (whites, blacks, and Hispanics) as a whole live in worse neighborhoods after prison. We attribute this racial variation in the effect of incarceration to the high degree of racial neighborhood inequality in the United States: because white offenders generally come from much better neighborhoods, they have much more to lose from a prison spell. In addition to advancing our understanding of the social consequences of the expansion of the prison population, these findings demonstrate the importance of controlling for preprison characteristics when investigating the effects of incarceration on residential outcomes.

Women's Education, Marital Violence, and Divorce: A Social Exchange Perspective.

Drawing on social exchange theories, the authors hypothesized that educated women are more likely than uneducated women to leave violent marriages and suggested that this pattern offsets the negative education - divorce association commonly found in the United States. They tested these hypotheses using 2 waves of young adult data on 914 married women from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The evidence suggests that the negative relationship between women's education and divorce is weaker when marriages involve abuse than when they do not. The authors observed a similar pattern when they examined the association of women's proportional earnings and divorce, controlling for education. Supplementary analyses suggested that marital satisfaction explains some of the association among women's resources, victimization, and divorce but that marital violence continues to be a significant moderator of the education - divorce association. In sum, education appears to benefit women by both maintaining stable marriages and dissolving violent ones.