Marriage and Desistance from Crime in the Netherlands: Do Gender and Socio-Historical Context Matter?

By Bianca E. Bersani, J. Laub, Paul Nieuwbeerta. 2009

242 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Over the last two decades, research examining desistance from crime in adulthood has steadily increased. The evidence from this body of research consistently demonstrates that salient life events—in particular, marriage—are associated with a reduction of offending across the life course. However, previous studies have been largely limited to male samples in the United States. As a result, questions regarding the universal effect of these relationships remain. Specifically, research is needed to assess whether the desistance effect of life events like marriage varies by gender and/or socio-historical context in countries other than the U.S. The present research addresses these gaps by examining the relationship between marriage and criminal offending using data from the Criminal Career and Life Course Study (CCLS). The CCLS includes criminal conviction histories spanning a large portion of the life course for nearly 5,000 men and women convicted in the Netherlands in 1977. Because we assess change over multiple observations within and between individuals, we utilize hierarchical models to estimate gender and contextual effects of marriage on criminal offending (i.e., any, violent, and property convictions). Overall, we find consistent support for the idea that marriage reduces offending across gender and socio-historical context. Notably, we find that the reduction in the odds of offending due to marriage is significantly greater for individuals in the most contemporary context. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Subfields: General Health Professions, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/179d0c49b814f1cc52a262c5938fae2e3fae652c

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In General Health Professions

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Human Agency and Explanations of Criminal Desistance: Arguments for a Rational Choice Theory (2015, result): “[9] found that being married was associated with a 35 % reduction on the odds of conviction—a marriage effect of comparable magnitude to other studies.”
Assessing the Impact of First-Time Imprisonment on Offenders’ Subsequent Criminal Career Development: A Matched Samples Comparison (2009, background): “2007) and studies on the data used in this analysis (Blokland and Nieuwbeerta 2005; Bersani et al. 2009) find that marriage is associated with a lower risk of criminal behavior and recidivism.”