Why Back-to-School Leads to More Crime
Back-to-school is supposed to bring relief. Relief to parents who work and have to figure out child care in the summer. Relief to kids with bad home lives and those who rely on school for meals. And relief that kids will be supervised, no longer free to, say, shoplift or vandalize.
A widespread narrative that criminal behavior peaks in the summer months has long been thought to include criminal behavior by children. But new research indicates that children ages 10 to 17 are most likely to be involved in a reported crime right after they get back to school and right before they are let out for summer.
On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the economist Ezra Karger, who wrote a 2023 paper revealing that, unlike for adults, kids’ criminal activity doesn’t peak in the summer. Along with his co-author, Todd Jones, Karger reveals that when back-to-school time hits, kids are being arrested for behavior such as simple assault, drug crimes, and sexual assault—raising questions about whether school is creating the conditions for criminal behavior and victimization.
“So the conclusion we came to while digging into this paper is that taking a bunch of 10-to-17-year-olds and putting them in a large building—where they’re interacting with their friends, but also maybe people who aren’t their friends—that is leading them to be engaged in crime that is reported to law-enforcement agencies, and that is leading them to be arrested at higher rates,” Karger explains. “And we have a lot of analysis showing that this relationship is causal, that these patterns occur exactly when school is in session, that they don’t happen on weekends, that they don’t happen over the summer.”
