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Cited by 446

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Juvenile Crime and Punishment

Open access
Levitt, Steven D.·1998·Journal of Political Economy

Abstract

Over the last two decades Juvenile violent crime has grown almost twice as quickly as that of adults. This paper finds that changes in relative punishments can account for 60 percent of that differential. Juvenile offenders are at least as responsive to criminal sanctions as adults. Sharp drops in crime at the age of majority suggest that deferrence (and not merely incapacitation) plays an important role. There does not, however, appear to be a strong relationship between the punitiveness of the juvenile justice system that a cohort faces and the extent of criminal involvement for that cohort later in life.

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Metadata

Authors
Levitt, S. D.
Venue
Journal of Political Economy
Published
1998-12
Volume
106
Issue
6
Pages
1156-1185
ISSN
  • 0022-3808 (ISSN-L)
  • 1537-534X
OpenAlex
W2554927321
Cited by
446
References
0
FWCI
24.45
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Juvenile Crime and Punishment. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1086/250043
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Levitt, S. D. (1998). Juvenile Crime and Punishment. Journal of Political Economy. https://doi.org/10.1086/250043

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.