Essays on Schools, Crime, and Punishment

Abstract

This dissertation consists of three essays on schools, crime, and punishment. The first essay — stemming from collaborative work with Christopher Jencks, Anthony Braga, and David Deming — uses longitudinal school and arrest records to examine the long-term effects of winning the lottery to attend one's first-choice high school on students' arrest outcomes in the Boston Public Schools. The second essay uses quasi-experimental regression and matching techniques to examine the effect of out-of-school suspension on serious delinquency using the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97). The third essay examines the increasing use of exclusionary school discipline and incarceration since the 1970s from a life course perspective. It advances the notion of a "disciplinary career," which captures disciplinary experiences across three domains: home, school, and the juvenile and criminal justice systems. In this essay, I use the NLSY97 to estimate the prevalence of various disciplinary experiences across the early life course and draw on qualitative data from the Boston Reentry Study to explore how individuals who experience high levels of harsh discipline perceive the interplay between offending and punishment over time. I close the dissertation by discussing these essays' implications for theory and policy.