Criminal Behaviour from School to the Workplace: Untangling the Complex Relations Between Employment, Education and Crime

This volume focuses on the complex relation between offending and the transition from school to the workplace: how employment and education are related to breaking the law and getting in contact with the criminal justice system. The contributors report results from several large scale and sophisticated studies conducted in the Netherlands that gathered rich data on employment, education and criminal behaviour. Each of the studies focuses on a particular period during the life course and particular risk categories. Taken together, they contribute to our understanding of how getting out of school, getting into a job and doing illegal things are intertwined over the life-course, and how these relations differ with age and gender.

The background of this volume is our interest in the often-studied relation between offending and employment, or more generally, between offending and the transition from school to work, including dropping out, part-time work and joblessness. The available literature casts little doubt that employment and education are indeed related to less crime and offending. However, this relation is much more complex than it appears at first hand.

The volume is primarily aimed at researchers and students in the fields of criminology, sociology and economics. However, it may also be of use for non-academic professionals, in particular policy makers and practitioners in the field of criminal justice, probation/rehabilitation, and youth/schools.

Frank Weerman is senior researcher at the NSCR. His research interests are juvenile delinquency and criminological theory, with a focus on the role of peers in delinquent behaviour. He coordinated the "NSCR School Project", a longitudinal study among secondary school students, and was also involved in the longitudinal Study of Peers, Activities and Neighbourhoods (SPAN).

Catrien Bijleveld is senior researcher at the NSCR and professor of Research Methods in Criminology at the VU University Amsterdam. She has been appointed as member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). Her research activities focus on criminal careers, effects of (experimental) interventions, juvenile sex offenders, historical trends in punishment and offending and intergenerational continuity in offending.