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“Because You’re Mine, I Walk the Line”? Marriage, Spousal Criminality, and Criminal Offending Over the Life Course

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Abstract

Objectives

This study is an analysis of the relationship between marriage and crime in a high-risk sample of Dutch men and women. Marriages are classified as to whether the spouse had been convicted of a crime prior to the marriage, in order to ascertain if one’s criminal career after marriage unfolds differently depending on the criminal history of one’s spouse.

Methods

Data are from the Criminal Career and Life-Course Study, a random sample of all individuals convicted of a criminal offense in the Netherlands in 1977 (N = 4,615). Lifetime criminal histories for all subjects are constructed from age 12 to calendar year 2003. Official marriage records are also consulted, and the criminal history of all spouses are similarly constructed. Fixed-effects Poisson models are estimated to quantify the relationship between marriage, spousal criminality, and conviction frequency, controlling for age, parenthood, prior conviction, and prior incarceration.

Results

Among men, marriage reduces the frequency of criminal conviction, but only if the marriage is to a non-convicted spouse. Marriage to a convicted spouse, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from singlehood—it neither discourages nor promotes criminal behavior. Among women, marriage has a crime-reducing effect, regardless of the criminal history of the spouse. A set of preliminary follow-up analyses suggests further that men with more extensive criminal histories, and with more stable marriages, benefit in a more pronounced way from marriage to a non-convicted spouse. However, even unstable marriages to non-convicted spouses appear to reduce conviction frequency while they last.

Conclusions

Marriage is indeed a salient transition in the criminal career, but there are important differences depending on the characteristics of the offender (gender, criminal history), the characteristics of the spouse (criminal history), and the characteristics of the marriage (duration). The authors conclude that while marriage matters, it does not necessarily mean the end of a criminal career, and that processes of both partner selection and partner influence deserve close attention by marriage-crime researchers. Qualifications of the study’s findings include the use of conviction data from official sources, the use of a sample of men and women who were all convicted of a crime at some point in their lives, the study of legal marriage in the Netherlands, and the inability to measure potential mechanisms for the observed marriage effects.

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Notes

  1. In the Dutch criminal justice system, the public prosecutor has the discretionary power not to prosecute all cases forwarded by the police. First, the public prosecutor may decide to drop the case if prosecution would probably not lead to conviction due to lack of evidence, or for technical considerations (procedural or technical waiver). Second, the public prosecutor is authorized to waive prosecution “for reasons of public interest” (waiver for policy considerations). The Board of Prosecutors-General has issued national prosecution guidelines under which a public prosecutor may decide to waive a case for policy reasons. In some cases measures other than penal sanctions are preferable or more effective, or prosecution would be disproportionately unjust or ineffective in relation to the nature of the offense or the offender, or prosecution would be contrary to the interest of the state or the victim (Tak 2003).

  2. The mean age in 1977 is older than the peak of the well-known age-crime curve. This is because the CCLS contains data on criminal convictions rather than arrests, which will lead to a slightly older sample. On average, the CCLS offenders have been followed for 32 years (min = 1, max = 60). The sample size varies across ages. For example, at age 12, the data contain information on all 4,615 individuals. The sample drops at age 22 (4,605), age 32 (4,547), age 42 (4,255), age 62 (788), and age 72 (245).

  3. Most of the subjects in our sample—76 %—marry only once.

  4. The fixed-effects Poisson model proceeds by maximizing the conditional likelihood, where conditioning is achieved by summing across each individual’s T i observations on the dependent variable. This technically makes it a conditional fixed-effects model. Therefore it necessarily excludes individuals whose observations (here, total number of convictions) sum to zero during the period of observation, resulting in the loss of degrees of freedom. In our model, 3,356 of the 4,191 men (80 %) are retained, whereas 173 of the 424 women (41 %) are retained.

  5. The first order-lags, Con i,t−1 and Inc i,t−1, capture recency in criminal offending and are binary while the second-order lags, AccumCon i,t−2 and AccumInc i,t−2, capture the accumulated criminal history and are non-binary. By including both types of variables we can distinguish the short-term, state-dependent effects of criminal conviction and incarceration from the long-term effects.

  6. Note that the estimates yield average reductions over the entire span of marriage. However, some subjects (i.e., those who were older in 1977) are in the analysis for more years than others. To test the sensitivity of the results, we estimated the models by limiting attention to discrete post-marriage intervals: the first 1, 5, and 10 years of the first marriage. To be able to compare married and unmarried persons, singles were followed until the mean age of first marriage plus respectively 1, 5, or 10 years. Importantly, for males and females alike, the findings are replicated when a limited number of post-marriage years are considered.

  7. At the request of an anonymous reviewer, we also investigated cohort effects. Cohabitation has become much more widespread over the last decades. Therefore, the effects of marriage may have changed over time. We limited this investigation to male subjects, as the results for females did not exhibit sensitivity to birth cohort. We began by stratifying the men into one of three cohorts based on their birth year (1907–1945, 1946–1955, 1956–1965), and then constructed separate marriage indicators for each cohort to include into the fixed-effects Poisson model. Interestingly, for the earliest cohort, the coefficient for marriage was positive and statistically significant, while it was negative and significant for the last two cohorts. This suggests that, relative to singlehood, marriage to a non-convicted spouse increases in salience and desistance potential over time. In the earliest cohort, in fact, these marriages appear to be criminogenic. However, the contrasting coefficient for marriage to a convicted spouse was positive and significant for all three cohorts, indicating that marriage to a non-convicted spouse is more beneficial compared to marriage to a convicted spouse, irrespective of cohort. An additionally interesting result was that, for the latest cohort only, marriage to a convicted spouse was associated with a significant reduction in convictions compared to being single. This suggests that even marriage to a convicted spouse possesses desistance potential in later cohorts (but not as much potential as marriage to a non-convicted spouse). The finding that the crime-reducing impact of marriage becomes stronger over time is in line with the study of Bersani et al. (2009). They argue that the quality and stability of recent marriages may be higher, because these marriages are often preceded by cohabitation. Cohabitation is considered to be a testing phase, and marriage a further investment in the relationship.

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Correspondence to Marieke van Schellen.

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van Schellen, M., Apel, R. & Nieuwbeerta, P. “Because You’re Mine, I Walk the Line”? Marriage, Spousal Criminality, and Criminal Offending Over the Life Course. J Quant Criminol 28, 701–723 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-012-9174-x

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