CRIME AND THE TRANSITION TO MARRIAGE: The Role of the Spouse's Criminal Involvement

Influential perspectives in life course criminology maintain that marriage leads to desistance from crime, and the mechanisms are largely related to spousal social control. Whether and to what degree marriage represents a break from a criminal past might depend on the spouse's criminal attitude...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:British journal of criminology 2014-05, Vol.54 (3), p.411-427
Main Authors: Skardhamar, Torbjørn, Monsbakken, Christian W., Lyngstad, Torkild H.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attitudes
Cohabitation
Couples
Crime
Crime rates
Crime reduction
Criminal justice
Criminal motive
Criminal records
Criminals
Criminology
Drug related crimes
Gender
Marriage
Norway
Probability
Social Control
Spouses
Wives
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Summary:Influential perspectives in life course criminology maintain that marriage leads to desistance from crime, and the mechanisms are largely related to spousal social control. Whether and to what degree marriage represents a break from a criminal past might depend on the spouse's criminal attitude. We study how changes in offending are related to marriage, and how the patterns vary by the wife's criminal record. We use data from Norwegian administrative registers that cover the total population of all persons who married in Norway between 1997 and 2001 (N = 80,064). We use information on these persons' criminal records in two five-year periods before and after marriage as well as information on their wives' criminal records in the same period, to estimate the probability of offending across an 11-year period around the time of marriage. We do so in a way that takes premarital changes in criminal behaviour into account. We find that the desistance process tend to start up to several years before marriage, and that the decline is greater for those who marry a wife with a criminal record.
ISSN:0007-0955
1464-3529
DOI:10.1093/bjc/azu011