Search Results
Title: The Marriage Effect Revisited: Desistance from Crime, or Desistance from Arrest?
Resulting in 1 citation.
| 1. |
Schroeder, Ryan D. Bersani, Bianca Elizabeth Mowen, Thomas |
|
The Marriage Effect Revisited: Desistance from Crime, or Desistance from Arrest? Presented: Atlanta GA, American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting, November 2013 Cohort(s): NLSY97 Publisher: American Society of Criminology Keyword(s): Crime; Criminal Justice System; Life Course; Marriage Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. The marriage effect on criminal desistance has received a considerable amount of attention in the criminological literature over the past two decades. The main conclusion reached is that marriage increases the likelihood of criminal desistance. The vast majority of prior studies on the marriage effect, however, have used arrest counts as the outcome measure. In the current study, we contend that a shift in criminal justice contacts is not a reliable indicator of actual behavioral change. Drawing on opportunity theory and the Black’s theory of law, we examine the extent to which marriage redirects offending away from the streets and to opportunistic crimes within the home. In this sense, we investigate the possibility that the marriage effect observed in prior research accounts for desistance from official offending but fails to address the hidden crimes that occur outside the purview of the justice system. Using data from the first seven waves of the National Youth Survey, we document patterns of behavioral change from adolescence to adulthood, focusing on the degree to which offending shifts away from high-arrest-risk crimes and narrows to offenses within the home during periods of marriage. Results and implications for life course theory are discussed. |
|
|
Bibliography Citation
Schroeder, Ryan D., Bianca Elizabeth Bersani and Thomas Mowen. "The Marriage Effect Revisited: Desistance from Crime, or Desistance from Arrest?" Presented: Atlanta GA, American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting, November 2013. |