TY - JOUR
T1 - Marriage and Offending among a Cohort of Disadvantaged African Americans
AU - Doherty, Elaine Eggleston
AU - Ensminger, Margaret E.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by NIDA R01 DA022366, Margaret Ensminger, Principal Investigator.
PY - 2013/2
Y1 - 2013/2
N2 - Objectives: Drawing on Sampson and Laub's age-graded theory of informal social control, this research tests the generalizability of the marriage effect on desistance from crime. Specifically, do urban African American men and women living in the United States benefit from marriage similarly to Whites? Methods: The authors use hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to analyze the relationship between marriage and official arrest counts among African American male and female first graders from Woodlawn, an inner-city community in Chicago, first assessed in 1966 and followed up at three time points (ages 16, 32, and 42). Results: The authors find strong evidence of a marriage effect for the males across crime type, with a reduction in offending between 21 percent and 36 percent when in a state of marriage. The findings for females were less consistent across crime type, a 10 percent reduction in the odds of a property arrest and a 9 percent increase in the odds of a drug arrest when in a state of marriage. Conclusions: Their findings provide evidence in favor of the generality of Sampson and Laub's theory, at least for males. However, the authors were not able to evaluate the mechanisms of desistance and identify this as an area of future research.
AB - Objectives: Drawing on Sampson and Laub's age-graded theory of informal social control, this research tests the generalizability of the marriage effect on desistance from crime. Specifically, do urban African American men and women living in the United States benefit from marriage similarly to Whites? Methods: The authors use hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to analyze the relationship between marriage and official arrest counts among African American male and female first graders from Woodlawn, an inner-city community in Chicago, first assessed in 1966 and followed up at three time points (ages 16, 32, and 42). Results: The authors find strong evidence of a marriage effect for the males across crime type, with a reduction in offending between 21 percent and 36 percent when in a state of marriage. The findings for females were less consistent across crime type, a 10 percent reduction in the odds of a property arrest and a 9 percent increase in the odds of a drug arrest when in a state of marriage. Conclusions: Their findings provide evidence in favor of the generality of Sampson and Laub's theory, at least for males. However, the authors were not able to evaluate the mechanisms of desistance and identify this as an area of future research.
KW - criminological theory
KW - desistance from crime
KW - developmental theories
KW - life-course theory
KW - race/ethnicity
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U2 - 10.1177/0022427811423106
DO - 10.1177/0022427811423106
M3 - Article
C2 - 24817770
AN - SCOPUS:84873615448
SN - 0022-4278
VL - 50
SP - 104
EP - 131
JO - Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency
JF - Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency
IS - 1
ER -