
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 24, 1994                   TAG: 9402240183
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-6   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO                                LENGTH: Short

GIVING JOBS TO TEENS MAY UP RISK OF CRIME

Giving jobs to inner-city high-school students can increase their risk of committing crimes, but providing decent jobs for their parents could lower the risk, a researcher reported Wednesday.

Doing well in school is a key to avoiding crime, and teen-agers who get after-school jobs tend to do worse in school, said Robert D. Crutchfield, a sociologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.

At the same time, teen-agers whose parents have decent jobs do better in school, because they see a payoff, Crutchfield said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The conclusions were based on a study of 6,000 teen-agers across the country, he said.

In a separate study, Jeffrey Fagan, a criminologist at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J., found that an important cause of rising crime in the inner cities was the loss of manufacturing jobs in recent decades.

Both researchers emphasized that to reduce crime it is crucial to replace those lost jobs with jobs that are similarly stable, offer at least some chance of advancement and provide benefits.

- Associated Press

by CNB