Birds of a Feather Born Together? On Siblings, Crime, and Criminal Legal System Contact

Classic criminological scholarship emphasizes sibling correlations in delinquency, criminal offending, and system contact. This foundational work, however, has mostly not translated to a rich contemporary research agenda on whether and how siblings influence one another—an unfortunate omission given that siblings spend significant time together throughout the life course. Our review, therefore, has one overarching goal: to invigorate the criminological study of siblings in an era of increasingly complex and varied family systems. We trace the sporadic criminological literature on siblings over the past half-century and document the relative absence of research on siblings in core criminology journals. In so doing, we lean on interdisciplinary scholarship to argue that siblings have been both undertheorized and underanalyzed in criminology, highlight the practical barriers and causal identification challenges to isolating so-called sibling spillovers, and rummage the limited landscape of recent empirical research for insights to push the field forward.