Employment, Crime, and Deviance Across the Life-Course

Abstract

Employment and labor market conditions have been studied extensively in criminology. While it would seem all but certain that unemployment and economic disadvantage promote crime, early macro-level research produced inconsistent and mixed results. More recently, micro-level and more sophisticated macro-level studies have demonstrated a complex relationship between employment, crime, and deviance. After explaining the great variety of roles in which employment is postulated to play in the most prominent theories of crime, this chapter describes the role of employment in the context of the life-course principles as outlined by Elder in order to highlight some of the less obvious ways in which employment impacts crime and deviance more generally that are perhaps deserving of more attention. Next, research on the manner in which employment shapes and is shaped by delinquency and crime from adolescence to adulthood, including the transition between these life stages, is reviewed. In closing, this chapter notes several of the many areas in which further research is needed, where the gaps are the largest, and arguably the greatest impact can be made.