Chitra Balakrishnan, BA, Christina Robillard, MSc, & Brianna Turner, PhD
On a typical day, 48,000 adolescents are detained due to criminal justice involvement in the US (Sawyer, 2019). According to social control theory, adolescents who develop strong and positive attachments with close others refrain from criminal offending to avoid jeopardizing these relationships, while adolescents with weak and negative attachments to close others may engage in criminal behaviour since they believe there is nothing to lose. Coercive family theory builds upon social control theory by positing a bidirectional association between relationship quality and offending. According to this theory, a vicious cycle may be initiated when a young child’s misbehaviour is paired with ineffective parenting strategies. Over time, negative parent-child interactions lower the quality of their relationship and intensify the child’s misbehaviour, which may eventually escalate to criminal offending. To date, few studies have comprehensively tested the propositions of these theories. To address this knowledge gap, this study investigated the longitudinal, bidirectional relationships between parent, peer, and romantic relationship quality and criminal offending in justice-involved youth. The study used archival data from the Pathways to Desistance study, which comprehensively interviewed 1354 (86% male, Mage = 16, 20% White) justice-involved youth in the United States across seven years. Analyses for this study were limited to the first three years. Consistent with social control theory, the present study affirms that having high quality relationships with parents is a protective factor against youth criminal offending. Social control theory and coercive family theory were not supported with respect to peer and romantic relationships. Justice-involved youth could benefit from family-based therapy that focuses on recognizing and repairing poor quality familial relationships. Future research should account for parents’, peers; and romantic partners’ deviancy, as it could interact with and confound their quality of relationship and address concerns of disproportionately higher arrest rates of people of colour; be conservative in generalizing findings and prevent developing prejudiced narratives against certain racial/ethnic groups in society.
