Examining the Unequal Decline in Race-Specific Youth Offending: A Decomposition Analysis

Purpose: The current study examines offending patterns among Black and White youth across cohorts between 1988 and 2019 in the U.S. Specifically, we investigate how changes in adolescents’ exposure to social control, access to crime opportunities, and motivation for crime are linked to the unequal decline in offending among Black and White youth. Methods: We apply the Blinder-Oaxaca (BO) three-fold decomposition method to analyze Monitoring the Future (MTF) 12th Grade data from 1988 to 2019. This approach allows us to disentangle the contributions of endowment changes and coefficient changes across all independent variables to the race-specific decline in violent and property offending. Results: We find that the declines in unstructured socializing and alcohol use account for most of the reduction in offending among White youth, but such changes did not yield comparable declines in offending among Black youth. This disparity reflects countervailing endowment and coefficient changes uniquely experienced by Black adolescents, including sharper declines in school attachment, modest increases in sensation seeking, and a strengthening of the criminogenic effects of unstructured socializing, as well as potential changes in unobserved factors not captured in the analysis. Conclusions: The processes underlying between-cohort changes in offending are different for Black youth compared to their White counterparts. Broader social changes associated with crime reduction among youth in recent decades might have had limited or delayed protective effects in specific population subgroups. Our findings suggest that understanding temporal changes in youth behavior requires a race-specific perspective and a clear differentiation between endowment and coefficient changes.