Wealthy and Wise? Influence of Socioeconomic Status on the Community Adjustment of Previously Incarcerated Youth.

For decades the impact of socioeconomic status (SES) on delinquent behavior among youth has been discussed (Siegel & Senna, 1997). Some evidence suggests that youth from varying SES backgrounds engage in different patterns of delinquency, with poorer youth being more inclined to continue these behaviors through adolescence and into adulthood. The impact of incarceration on youth from both ends of the SES spectrum, however, has gone largely uninvestigated (Siegel & Senna).Given our current era of fiscal austerityespecially regarding social services-coupled with the cost of incarcerating youth (about $65,000/year in many states) and the profound effects of the criminal acts they commit on victims and in terms of societal costs, it is imperative to offer effective interventions to these young people that will foster their community adjustment after leaving the correctional system (Bullis, Yovanoff, Havel, and Mueller, 2001). Such interventions have the potential to improve the lives of these young people, as well as saving substantial public funds, but services to youth in correctional facilities-especially those with disabilities-generally are inadequate (Leone, Meisel, & Drakeford, 2002). To improve these interventions and focus them in the most powerful way it first is necessary to gain a clear understanding of the transition of youths of different SES backgrounds from the correctional setting to the community.Crime is often viewed as an enterprise of the poor, with people living in poverty being arrested and convicted at a much higher rate than people from high SES backgrounds (Reiman, 1998). Jessor, Donovan, and Costa (1991) suggested that adolescents from advantaged SES backgrounds involved in serious forms of delinquent behavior were more able to overcome their prior criminal transgressions than youth from working class families. Similarly, other studies using census data have shown that low SES status is related to more frequent and severe delinquency among youth (Loeber & Wikstrom, 1993; Peeples & Loeber, 1994; Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997). A recent study addressing the neighborhood living context of youth (i.e., high and low SES neighborhoods; Beyers, Loeber, Wikstrom, & Stouthamer-Loeber, 2001) indicated that predictors of repeated violent delinquency were different for youth from these divergent types of neighborhoods. The sample of 420 urban youth from high SES neighborhoods, compared to youth from low SES neighborhoods, was half as likely (20.8% vs. 37.2%; x2 = 12.86, p These results suggest differences in the delinquent behavior of youth from low and high SES backgrounds, but the nuances of those differences and the influence of SES on the longer term adjustment of formerly incarcerated youth have not been explored in detail. These omissions are surprising, given the attention that has been paid to differences between other demographically determined groups of adolescents in correctional settings (e.g., Bullis, Yovanoff, & Havel, 2004; Bullis et al., 2001). The purpose of this article, then, is to examine this topic through analysis of an extant database.The Transition Research on Adjudicated Youth in Community Settings (TRACS ) project (Bullis et al., 2004; Bullis et al., 2001) profiled the facility-to-community transition experiences of a sample of 531 formerly incarcerated youth. They recruited a sample of youth with and without special education disabilities who were remanded to the Oregon Youth Authority (OYA), the State of Oregon's juvenile correctional system. They gathered data on the sample's educational, personal, and criminal histories, and on services received while in the juvenile correctional system, then interviewed the youth after leaving OYA on parole-and, when possible, a family member-at 6-month intervals to profile community adjustment experiences. …