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Understanding the Role of Marriage in Black Women’s Offending Over the Life Course

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Abstract

Purpose

Black women remain a traditionally understudied population in life course criminology and in studies of criminal desistance specifically. This work contributes to the desistance literature by focusing on within-group heterogeneity among black women, and examining whether variation in the structural position (measured at both distal and proximate points in the life course) conditions the relationship between a well-recognized correlate of desistance—marriage—and offending.

Methods

The sample of 636 black females is drawn from the Woodlawn project, a longitudinal, interdisciplinary study of social adaptation, psychological well-being, and crime in a Chicago community cohort of black Americans who were in first grade in 1966. To test for potential moderating effects of structural position on the marriage-offending link, we employ hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to simultaneously estimate variation in crime within-individuals while accounting for between-individual differences in offending.

Results

Findings suggest that both childhood and adult measures of structural position condition the marriage-offending link in important ways. Most notably, black women who are more socioeconomically disadvantaged reap greater benefits from marriage—in the form of a reduced probability of offending—than their more advantaged counterparts.

Conclusion

To the degree that women’s pathways to offending are shaped by their socioeconomic marginalization, the practical benefits of marriage (e.g., economic improvement) might surpass other traditionally recognized mechanisms of desistance (e.g., social bonds) in their importance. Future life course research should highlight the complexity of lived experiences by explicitly considering one’s race, gender, and social-structural position.

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Notes

  1. Whereas research on cohabitation marks an important domain for future scholarship, we maintain as others have (see, e.g., [95]) that marriage—particularly in the historical context of the Woodlawn sample—is a greater investment than cohabitation, incurring social benefits, obligations, and stressors that may be lacking in other relationships. Further, given the equivocal research findings on the benefits of marriage among traditionally understudied populations particularly black women, we maintain our focus on this particular institution, but map out plans to explore other types of relationships in our discussion.

  2. Those who received welfare were considered to be below the poverty line since the eligibility requirement for receiving welfare in Illinois at this time was living below the poverty level.

  3. As outlined by Farrington and Loeber [29], interaction effects are more easily studied and interpreted with dichotomous data. Also, these researchers found, as opposed to losing information by dichotomizing, there is a decrease in classification error when there are fewer categories into which a person can be assigned.

  4. Although a direct measure of juvenile delinquency would more closely tap into criminal propensity, only a subset of the original cohort was assessed in adolescence. Using the juvenile delinquency measure in the analysis reduces the sample size by 38% (from 491 to 306). Aggression and high school dropout are significantly related to the index of juvenile delinquency, which is a summed index of how often in the past 3 years each woman had engaged in any of 18 non-drug related self-report items (0 = never to 5 = 5+ times). T-tests reveal that both aggression and high school dropout are significantly related to the index of self-reported delinquency (t = −1.978, p = .050 and t = −2.593, p = .010, respectively).

  5. The role of parenthood among black women is likely an important predictor of both marriage and crime. Although the data is limited in its measure of parenthood, we ran all of the analytic models with the additional control of parenthood, defined as whether a woman self-reported having children or not at age 32. Due to the data limitations, further reductions in sample size, and overall convergence of the results with and without parenthood as a control, we present the results without the inclusion of parenthood. Specifically, all model estimates are similar in magnitude, direction, and statistical significance with and without the inclusion of parenthood as a between-individual control with one exception.

  6. When parenthood is included as a control in the early poverty model (Model 2a), the magnitude and direction of the marriage and interaction coefficients are similar, yet the interaction effect is not significant.

  7. The uptick at age 17 is likely an artifact of the modeling strategy of using age3. To assess if the desistance trend continues beyond age 42, we used available official criminal history data for these women and extended the trajectories to age 52, assuming stability of marriage based on the age 42 interview data. This assumption seems appropriate as 85% of the women had no marital change in the 5 years prior to age 42 (i.e., from ages 38 to 42; 59% were continuously married, 26% were continuously not married in the prior 5 years). These analyses (available on request) show that these women continue to desist into their 50s.

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Acknowledgements

This study uses data from the Woodlawn project, which was designed and executed by Shepphard Kellam and Margaret Ensminger and funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse and other NIH institutes. We are especially grateful to these original researchers, the Woodlawn study participants, Woodlawn Advisory Board, and all of the researchers who have been instrumental in creating and maintaining this rich data set. We thank Shytierra Gaston for her research assistance on this paper and John Laub, Lee Slocum, Kerry Green, and Margaret Ensminger for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Funding

The current research was partially funded by NIDA grant R01 DA033999 and by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri – St. Louis, One University Boulevard, St. Louis, MO, 63121, USA

    Stephanie M. DiPietro & Elaine Eggleston Doherty

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, MA, 02125-3393, USA

    Bianca E. Bersani

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Correspondence to Stephanie M. DiPietro.

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DiPietro, S.M., Doherty, E.E. & Bersani, B.E. Understanding the Role of Marriage in Black Women’s Offending Over the Life Course. J Dev Life Course Criminology 4, 162–187 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-018-0079-8

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