By age 23, almost a third of Americans have been arrested for a crime, according to a new study that researchers say is a measure of growing exposure to the criminal-justice system in everyday life.
The study found that 30.2 percent of the 23-year-olds who participated had been arrested for an offense other than a minor traffic violation.
That figure is significantly higher than the 22 percent found in a 1965 study.
The study did not look at racial or regional differences.
“This estimate provides a real sense that the proportion of people who have criminal- history records is sizable and perhaps much larger than most people would expect,” said Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the State University of New York at Albany and a co-author of the study, which appears in today’s issue of the journal Pediatrics.
