An Analysis of the Relationship Between Work-Related Stressors and Criminal Behavior

Abstract

The U.S. work culture places a significant burden on working families, with so-called "bad jobs" drawing attention for their detrimental impact on employees’ well-being and their association with negative behavioral outcomes, including criminal behavior. While prior research has focused on the association between workplace stress and crime among law enforcement professionals and perpetrators of white-collar crimes, there is a lack of research on other occupations and for different types of offenses. My study aims to investigate whether work-related stressors, such as job strain, job dissatisfaction, low job commitment, and family-work conflict, contribute to individuals in the United States resorting to illegal means to fulfill their needs. More specifically, I examined the associations between work-related stressors and several criminal outcomes, including criminal offending, intimate partner violence (IPV), arrest, and incarceration, whether these associations were mediated by negative affective states (e.g., depression or anxiety), and whether individuals’ sex, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status (SES) moderated these associations. To achieve these objectives, I use data from three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of adolescents, and employ a series of logistic regression analyses to investigate the proposed associations. Findings reveal that low job commitment was associated with increased odds of criminal offending, IPV, arrest, and incarceration, while work-family conflict was associated with increased odds of IPV. In addition, job strain was positively and job dissatisfaction was negatively associated with incarceration. Depression and anxiety partially mediated the associations of low job commitment and work-family conflict with intimate partner violence. These findings suggest that individuals’ identities may be shifting away from the influence of work, and that the growth of low-quality employment needs to be stymied as it may have far-reaching effects on oneself and one’s community.