ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with two key areas of policy concern, namely, economic and schooling policies. We show how economic conditions (particularly radical shifts in key industries) and national policies are implicated in individual engagement in crime by the generation who grew up during this era. Here, like Chapter 3, we use individual-level longitudinal data from the National Child Development Study and the Birth Cohort Study. We subject these data to joint analyses in the first section, where we compare rates and experiences of school truancy in the 1970s and 1980s and focus on the 1970 birth cohort to explore the relationship between economic restructuring and their engagement in crime in the second section. We find that economic restructuring in the first 10 or so years of an individual's life is strongly predictive of the sorts of factors that in turn lead to engagement in crime as a juvenile.
