Crime And Education Case Study

Theory suggests that there are many direct links between the education and criminal behaviour. First, education increases the possibility of getting jobs, and higher education not only increase those odds further but also leads to a higher wage rate. Secondly, most often that not crimes lead to incarceration or being imprisoned and that leads to loss of time, time which can be used to earn wages. Usually higher education means a higher a wage rate, so the opportunity cost of getting incarcerated becomes even higher.
We can say that criminal behaviour and education, both appear to have common origins. Both, individuals who have committed crimes and uneducated people are more likely to come from lower socio-economic backgrounds. There are several

If human capital raises the marginal returns from work more than crime, then human capital investment and schooling should reduce crime. Thus, policies that increase schooling (or the efficiency of schooling) should reduce most types of street crime among adults; however, certain types of white collar crime (e.g. embezzlement, fraud) may increase with education if they sufficiently reward skills learned in school. Education may also teach individuals to be more patient (Becker and Mulligan 1997). This would discourage crime, since forward-looking individuals place greater weight on any expected future punishment associated with their criminal activities. To the extent that time preferences are affected by schooling, crimes associated with long prison sentences (or other long-term consequences) should be most affected. Education may also affect preferences toward risk. If schooling makes individuals more risk averse, it should discourage crime with its greatest effects on offenses that entail considerable uncertainty in returns or punishment. Finally, schooling may affect the set of people individuals interact with on a daily basis in school, work, or their neighbourhoods. Assuming more educated people interact more with other educated people who are less inclined to engage in crime, this is likely to

In particular, early criminal involvement in adolescence can have an impact on educational outcomes, which in turn may affect criminal activity in later stages of life. Juveniles in detention disconnect themselves from the traditional educational process, which ultimately creates gaps in their education. There is evidence showing that educational achievement gaps are persistent across ages and are difficult to remediate later (Cunha et al., 2006). In turn, lower educational attainment, as a result of educational achievement gaps, is likely to decrease future legitimate work opportunities and returns from the legitimate sector, which can motivate young people to fall back on criminal activities. Therefore, the relationship between criminal behavior and education of young people can be seen as a highly dynamic and complementary