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> The study appears to be using "arrested" to mean "convicted of a crime for which the person could have been arrested (taken in to police custody)"?

No, it uses it to mean arrested.

> Example: I have never been arrested/taken in to police custody but, I was convicted of providing alcohol to minors at a college party and, had I not willingly taken the citation from the officer or, had I been belligerent and uncooperative, I could have been arrested.

Legally, a citation issued for a crime is a non-custodial arrest. [1]

> Technically, you could argue while the officer was issuing me the citation I was under some sort of arrest, but that does not comport with either the legal notion of being under arrest or what most people think of as being under arrest.

No, it comports quite exactly with the legal notion of arrest, which can either be non-custodial (the type you report having experienced) or custodial (the type which tends to involve handcuffs.) To the extent the Wikipedia article you cite is inconsistent with that (and you seem to have linked to an irrelevant section of the article, though I do so material earlier which, though it is inaccurate, supports your presentation), it is simply wrong.

[1] See, e.g., http://www.waprosecutors.org/manuals/search/May%202012%20%20.... @ p. 252: "A non-custodial arrest occurs where the defendant is issued a citation for a criminal offense at the scene of a stop."

I just skimmed the article and found no (re-?)definition of 'arrest'. If it's 40% for the general population and the arrest rate is a function of economic class, the rate for the lower class would have to account for the significantly smaller rate that I perceive in my middle-class peer group.

Either that or my peers are statistical outliers. I don't think there's any other form of selection going on that would prevent them from being a representative sample of their economic class, though.

The article possibly indicated a loose definition of 'arrest' here, though:

> ...arrested or taken into custody for a nontraffic offense by age 23.

For my definitions of 'arrest' and 'custody', being arrested implies being taken into custody.

I would say you're is the most insightful comment in this thread. I am biased towards thinking you are correct in that when one publishes a paper, there are incentives towards a more dramatic interpretation/presentation of the data. So, a study that said 10% of all males have been arrested, would not have gotten as much notice as the current presentation.