Long-term effects of the Moving to Opportunity residential mobility experiment on crime and delinquency

Details

• Alternative Title:
  J Exp Criminol
• Personal Author:
  Sciandra, Matthew ; Sanbonmatsu, Lisa ; Duncan, Greg J. ; Gennetian, Lisa A. ; Katz, Lawrence F. ; Kessler, Ronald C. ; Kling, Jeffrey R. ; Ludwig, Jens
• Description:
  Objectives
  
  Using data from a randomized experiment, to examine whether moving youth out of areas of concentrated poverty, where a disproportionate amount of crime occurs, prevents involvement in crime.
  
  Methods
  
  We draw on new administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. MTO families were randomized into an experimental group offered a housing voucher that could only be used to move to a low-poverty neighborhood, a Section 8 housing group offered a standard housing voucher, and a control group. This paper focuses on MTO youth ages 15–25 in 2001 (n = 4,643) and analyzes intention to treat effects on neighborhood characteristics and criminal behavior (number of violent- and property-crime arrests) through 10 years after randomization.
  
  Results
  
  We find the offer of a housing voucher generates large improvements in neighborhood conditions that attenuate over time and initially generates substantial reductions in violent-crime arrests and sizable increases in property-crime arrests for experimental group males. The crime effects attenuate over time along with differences in neighborhood conditions.
  
  Conclusions
  
  Our findings suggest that criminal behavior is more strongly related to current neighborhood conditions (situational neighborhood effects) than to past neighborhood conditions (developmental neighborhood effects). The MTO design makes it difficult to determine which specific neighborhood characteristics are most important for criminal behavior. Our administrative data analyses could be affected by differences across areas in the likelihood that a crime results in an arrest.
  
  
• Keywords:
  Crime Long-term Impacts Neighborhood Effects Poverty Randomized Experiment
• Source:
  J Exp Criminol. 2013; 9(4)
• Pubmed ID:
  24348277
• Pubmed Central ID:
  PMC3858819
• Document Type:
  Journal Article
• Funding:
  R01 MH077026/MH/NIMH NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R49 CE000906/CE/NCIPC CDC HHSUnited States/ ; R01 HD040404/HD/NICHD NIH HHSUnited States/ ; P30 AG012810/AG/NIA NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R01 AG031259/AG/NIA NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R01 HD040444/HD/NICHD NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R56 AG031259/AG/NIA NIH HHSUnited States/ ; R24 HD051152/HD/NICHD NIH HHSUnited States/ ; P01 AG005842/AG/NIA NIH HHSUnited States/
• Volume:
  9
• Issue:
  4
• Collection(s):
  CDC Public Access
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha256:632e73dfeb9ea46224e3c516fc5b12b8607b115b92a0900fb539d4ee154e8aee
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/41931/cdc_41931_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 207.54 KB ]