School Zone: A Problem Analysis of Student Offending and Victimization

Schools should be safe—but they are not always safe for everybody. Authors Pamela Wilcox, Graham Ousey, and Marie Skubak Tillyer studied crime among students located across diverse middle- and high-school settings to investigate why some students engage in delinquency—but others do not—and why some students are more prone to victimization. School Zone focuses on the three key interactional elements—context, victims, and offenders—to understand and explain the impact of common crimes such as theft, weapon carrying, drug possession and the verbal, physical, and sexual harassment of classmates.

The authors also consider how individual students and schools respond to crime and threats. They analyze the variables that schools can control in planning and practice that explain why some schools have higher crime rates. School Zone uses empirical studies to provide a comprehensive understanding of the patterns and causes of variation in individual- and aggregate-level school-based offending and victimization experiences while also addressing the adequacy of wide-ranging criminological explanations and crime prevention policies.

In their conclusion, the authors assess the extent to which currently popular strategies of school crime prevention align with what they have discovered through their problem-analysis framework and scientific understandings of student offending and victimization.

Pamela Wilcox is a Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Pennsylvania State University. She is the coauthor of Criminal Circumstance:  A Dynamic, Multicontextual Criminal Opportunity Theory and Communities and Crime: An Enduring American Challenge (Temple), and the co-editor of Challenging Criminological Theory: The Legacy of Ruth Rosner Kornhauser.  
Graham C. Ousey is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at William & Mary.  
Marie Skubak Tillyer is a Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Texas at San Antonio.