One-third of young U.S. adults have been arrested according to a study... Close to one in three American teens and young adults get arrested by age 23, according to a new study that finds more of them are being booked now than in the 1960s.
Those arrests are for everything from underage drinking and petty theft to violent crime, researchers said. They added that the increase might not necessarily reflect more criminal behavior in youth, but rather a police force that's more apt to arrest young people than in the past....
...Robert Brame of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and his colleagues analyzed data from a nationally-representative youth survey conducted between 1997 and 2008.
A group of more than 7,000 adolescents age 12 to 16 in the study's first year filled out the annual surveys with questions including if and when they had ever been arrested.
Back in the day, most of my crowd had been taken into custody for one thing or another, and almost all were released without charges within hours or over night.
It almost became a badge of honor, a way to establish your cred if such cred was in doubt.
At one point, there was a "Honor Roll" at my employer of the time, Domino's Pizza. It listed the employees who had been arrested while going to, from, or on the job... and included half the crew and most of the drivers. It was in jest, really. We in the shop had a good time ribbing each other over it til the proprietor took it down.
This is why I think this study is largely skewed. You can't ask teens in a questionnaire about something that they want you to believe is true about them and expect results of integrity worth publishing.
Sure, most of us had been arrested. But not every teen is running around town throughout the night. For every kid who's out in the streets, there are 4-5 at home with their parents, shut in their room listening to music, reading a book... or something else lame like that.
I know some who were never actually arrested. Instead, they were cuffed and detained while their car was rifled through, to be released after the harassment was over. Afterwards they say "Yeah, well that counts don't it?" Largely making my point above as per establishing cred.
That, and it was almost entirely a guy thing. Cops didn't arrest girls unless they had to. Even if they were dealing with a mixed group, it was more likely to involve boys cuffed and sitting to the side while the girls were left uncuffed for their interrogation.
Take out that 50% of the sample that is female and there is no way to logically reach the results of 30% the study is claiming.
15 comments:
I wonder how much of this is skewed by policies (I know they are very common in Texas, but probably elsewhere, too) that make an awful lot of disciplinary problems at school police matters. That was something that was changing just as I was getting out of school ('96...I think my school added a police officer to the staff my senior year) and then really took off after Columbine a couple of years later.
high school in 96? i thought you around 92.
I was born old.
And I said "litterin," and they all moved away from me on the bench. So I added "and creating a nuisance," and so they all came back talking about mother raping,father stabbing,and all kinds of groovy things...and then the sargeant....
a quote from where?
I was never arrested. If I had been, I knew damn well my mother would have "left me there to rot". We did have one night where my group of friends had a conversation with police for going into a park after hours... I wonder how many of them would have counted that as "being arrested".
was anybody cuffed?
i remember one accasion where we got busted doing something wrong. all four of us were cuffed (actually, only two, the others got zip ties, glad i got the cuffs) and my budy asked why we were being arrested. the cop said we were being 'detained'.
Cred shmed. I've never been caught.
LOL, i knew a few that should have been. they were real ones.
I've never been arrested. Probably missed my window for that sort of thing.
Gino: Alice's Restaurant. And sad to say, I've never been arrested. Ticketed for speeding and parking violations, yes. Arrested, no.
dont pay the speeding ticket, and someday you can be as happy as the rest.
Check it:
http://www.theagitator.com/2011/12/20/a-funny-thing-happened-on-my-way-to-a-trend-piece/
i should write for the agitator, if actually knew how to write well (but i think i'm improving).
the dude misses the whole point. he's blaming govt for doing a study, but has seemed to miss the methodology of the study, which was my whole point.
(sure, i'm using anecdotal evidence, ((which he crticizes)) based upon my experiences, but i dont think my observations are without merit.)
its not truly a study in any scientific sense (that is if i understand it properly. i'm willing to allow a science dude school me on what a sceinetific sense would be), and seems to have been conducted to acheive a pretermined conclusion.
this is why i suspect 'studies', most especially those that are used to write a 'news' story. every journalist has an agenda.
so does every study taker.
for me, and i may be less than correct on this, most honest studies dont make news articles because they are too boring or of no comercial use to a journalist.
I recognized Bike Bubba's reference right away (thanks in part to http://thenightwriterblog.com/2008/07/12/the-great-hair-coloring-massacree/).
What I was picturing, though, was Bill Cosby's "Go Carts" story, complete with 900 cop cars waiting at the bottom of the hill to arrest the kids who were go-carting, and having to handcuff two or three of them together with one cuff because the kids' wrists were so skinny the cuffs kept falling off.
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