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Relationship Between Police Intervention And Juvenile Delinquency

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Stephanie A. Wiley and Finn-Aage Esbensen’s article (2016) research the relationship between police intervention and juvenile delinquency and what polices are ideal for deterring deviance amplification. There are two main theories that initiate America’s juvenile justice system: labeling and deterrence. Essentially, labeling proponents believe that official intervention increases delinquency and, oppositely, deterrence theorists argue that it cracks down on deviancy. Wiley et al. (2016:283) want to “inform this debate by examining the effect of being stopped or arrested on subsequent delinquent behavior and attitudes”. They hypothesize their results to reflect labeling theorists because delinquency will increase from police contact and …show more content…

Within these, there were 4.905 students in 195 classrooms and 77.9% (3,820) achieved parent consent, 78% (2,972) finished all three waves of data, and method deletion cut it down to the final 2,614 students. Wiley et al. initiated four dependent variables—anticipated guilt, neutralization, negative peer commitment, and delinquency frequency--one treatment variable--police contact--and covariate variables—demographics, controls, and risk factors. Furthermore, they used “propensity score matching to determine whether being stopped or arrested affects subsequent attitudes and behavior” (Wiley et al. 2016: 293). A double-edged sword, the psmatch 2 module for Stata 12.0 decreased the likelihood of poor matches, but dropped over 300 cases that failed to meet within the parameters. The results effectively confirm labeling theorist’s proposition that police intervention furthers, instead of deters, deviance. First, Wiley et al. achieved covariable balance on all the variables. Through their methods, they found that “arrest is associated with less anticipated guilt, greater acceptance of neutralization techniques, greater negative peer commitment, and more delinquency” (Wiley et al. 2016: 297). Before the results were matched, there were twenty-three more delinquent acts for juveniles who were contacted by police instead of not. Even so, after

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