From Hellraiser to Family Man

A fair body of solid research tells us that there is a moderately strong relationship between marriage and desistance from crime. I've been thinking a lot about this issue recently, and about what the policy implications of it are. I'm even thinking this may be an area I want to tackle for my dissertation (yes, I still haven't picked a dissertation topic yet).

The obvious question that comes up when we talk about a correlation between marriage and crime is whether or not it's a causal relationship. Some hold that it's merely correlational; that those who desist from crime are also those who are more likely to get married. Thus, this underlying propensity is really predicting both factors. I tend to side more with the social control perspective, that something about marriage can actually have a causal impact upon future criminal behavior. Sampson and Laub have done some good work in this area. Their most recent paper in Criminology on the marriage-crime relationship indeed finds a causal relationship. They use what they call a counterfactual approach to control for the problem of self-selection into marriage. Obviously it would be nice if we could randomly assign a group of ex-offenders to get married or not to get married, but that's never going to happen. Absent a true randomized experiment, Sampson and Laub's paper comes the closest methodologically (I believe) to being able to determine causality. They find that marriage reduces the odds of recidivism by about 35%. Quite an impressive effect! I'm not surprised that they found this strong of a relationship though. To me it just makes intuitive sense. When those studying correctional rehabilitation find similar effects for treatment programming, why shouldn't we believe that a potentially life-changing event like getting married could have an impact in the same range. How many people experience genuine change in their life from a program vs. from a life-changing event? The potential for a stronger effect from a life-changing event just resonates with me more.

But there's many questions that remain unanswered. I'd like to raise just a few of them. First, does the marriage have to be a good marriage in order to lead to desistance from crime? Can a not-so-good or even downright bad marriage still produce desistance? My gut tells me that we might still see a significant impact on desistance from even a bad marriage, although the healthy marriage will probably generate a stronger impact.

This leads to my second question. What is it about marriage that produces desistance? Is it that marriage tends to produce a change in attitudes and values? Is is that the married person's routine activities change, thus keeping them out of trouble? Is it the "nagging of a good wife"? Is it a change in self-identity ("from hellraiser to family man")? Is it "love that conquers all"? What's in that "black box" of the marriage effect. Again, I tend to lean more towards believing the social control explanations (e.g., the "nagging of a good wife"), but I also think the routine activities explanation holds a lot of weight too. I think Sampson and Laub would agree here, and present evidence of this in their interviews with the Glueck men in "Shared Beginnings, Divergent Lives".

The third question I have about the marriage effect is whether or not one has to be legally married to benefit from this effect. Can someone in a committed yet unmarried relationship equally benefit from that relationship in terms of desistance? Can same sex partners benefit? Obviously holding to a conservative Christian worldview as I do, I would expect to see that marriage in the traditional sense will produce the strongest effect. But if I'm intellectually honest then I must admit that ultimately it's an empirical question that has not yet been answered by research. Again, falling back on theory, it just makes too much sense to me to believe that traditional marriage would have the strongest effect. Remember in Hirschi's social control theory that the four elements of control are attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. In marriage, I think that one of the factors generating the marriage effect is commitment. Obviously marriage itself is a long-term commitment that holds a lot of serious legal implications. How much of a commitment really is a "committed unmarried relationship"? It would seem that on average you will find less real commitment in such relationships, and to the extend that you do then you would expect to find less of a controlling effect of marriage on criminal behavior. As far as same sex relationships, it would make for an interesting study but practically speaking it seems that it would be very difficult to be able to identify a large enough sample size of criminals who define themselves as being in a same sex relationship.

Maybe I'm being naive about that last point. But this leads to my fourth line of questioning. Has, as some have speculated, the institution of marriage changed so much in our culture that we should not expect to see a positive marriage effect on crime any longer? Admittedly, much of the research that finds a relationship between marriage and crime are longitudinal studies that examine a sample of individuals who came of age a decades ago. Is there a period effect related to marriage? How has cultural shifts in marriage impacted the relationship between marriage and crime? Once again going with my gut, I don't expect to find that much has changed. Think about it...marriage has been around since the beginning of time and across many cultures. I think we might be seeing an assault on traditional marriage but I think marriage and its concomitant benefits are here to stay.

Fifth, what about having children? Do we see an interaction effect or a confounding effect? Is what appears to be a marriage impact really an impact of being a parent? Or does being a parent add another protective factor in the mix, further strengthening the probability of desistance? I would love to see some research on this. We need to disentangle the impact of being a parent from the impact of being married.

Sixth, are there situations in which marriage can actually increase future criminal behavior? I'm thinking here particularly of domestic violence. I believe it was in a chapter in Blumstein's book on the crime drop (I think the chapter was by Rosenfeld) in which he finds that homicide rates have dropped because less people are getting married. He examines the types of homicides that contributed to the drop in homicides and found that domestic homicides had a particularly large effect on the drop. So how does this finding jive with other findings on the positive impacts of marriage?

These questions just touch the surface. There are many other questions that could be raised. What interests me is the policy implications of this research. I currently work for the PA Department of Corrections. What are we to do with a finding that there is a relationship between marriage and crime? We can't force our inmates to get married. But maybe we can provide informational sessions on marriage and also marriage counseling. The Oklahoma Department of Corrections is doing just that. I am very much interested to see the results of the evaluations that are being done on the Oklahoma program. John Laub has turned me on to the idea that maybe we can't force offenders to get married but maybe we can "nudge" them in that direction. He takes this concept of "nudging" from the title of a recent book by Thaler and Sunstein called "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness". I haven't read the book, but apparently in this book the authors discuss the idea that we can't force people to live healthier lives in order to reduce health care costs, but there are ways that we can nudge them in the direction of healthier living. Laub thinks there might be promise for applying this same concept to marriage.

Whatever future research may find in this area, I can certainly speak from personal experience. I know the marriage effect has worked for me. From hellraiser to family man! Better run, dinner is on the table. Coming Honey...(ha ha)