Police Contact Predicts Differences within Siblings’ Life-Course Outcomes

 By Juan Del Toro and John Roman     

  Youths’ interaction with law enforcement can have implications for their opportunities for upward social mobility. Indeed, prior studies indicate that police contact (i.e., stops and arrests) predicts lower persistence in education and higher unemployment. However, most researchers used between-individual designs to examine youth and police interactions, which limit claims of causality, as differences in life-course outcomes related to police encounters are likely biased by individual differences in genes and/or environments. Using standard within- and between-sibling analyses, we found that siblings with police contact have poorer life-course outcomes (i.e., years in school and income) across adolescence and adulthood than their sibling without police contact. The links between police contact and life-course outcomes are worse for police arrests (vs. police stops) and within Black siblings (than within Hispanic and White siblings). We believe that these results signal the need for alternative and more developmentally appropriate forms of punishment among America’s youth.

Chicago: NORC at the University of Chicago, 2023. 5p.