Marriage Reduce Crime? A Counterfactual Annotated Bibliography

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The authors follow this by questioning the equality of benefit for both partners. Even while criminally-minded men benefit, their female spouses may suffer ill effects that would not have been the case had they remained unmarried. This is a good basis for future study of another dimension of the effect of marriage on criminal activity.

Do determine the causality of marriage as a deterrent for crime, the authors use counterfactual methods, or causal inference. This means that observational data are used to determine the causal relationship between marriage and crime reduction.

The inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) is a statistical method that helped the authors handle the consideration of bias. The population for study was then chosen accordign to factors such as measured itnelligence, competence, self-control, and temperament as relevant to marriage selection. Other, more traditional factors were also included as potential predictors for marriage, such as employment and educational attainment, although most of the men investigated were high school dropouts. The authors go on to specifically discuss the measures that are relevant to marriage selection, and how individual differences played a role. The outcomes showed that family-background measures were less important during ages 17 to 32, although this factor grew in importance towards later life. Indeed, all 25 possible predictions appeared significant, including age, marriage history, criminal-deviance, etc.

The authors added three additional factors to the IPTW model in order to merge it with a generalized hierarchical model for longitudinal data. These include the conception of crime as a rare event, unexplained variation between individuals in the propensity to offence, and the variation across time and individuals in incarceration.

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Another interesting question the authors pose concerns the potential effects of the quality of marriage upon criminal behavior. It was found that deviant spouses had a negative effect upon the behavior of their criminally-minded men. However, even with the proportion of deviant spouses in the sample, the findings indicated a significant reduction in the criminal activity of men who are married by age 25, as opposed to those who are not. Specifically, the number comes to about a 35% reduction.

Towards the end of the article, the authors note that a study was made of cohabitation and its effect upon desistance from crime. The authors hypothesized that criminal activity could be reduced by being involved in a stable partnership, regardless of specific bonds in marriage. This was indicated by the data used, although the same extent of data analysis could not be applied in the few cases of cohabitation that was found. Hence, this also remains an area for future study.

In conclusion, it was an interesting study to read about, and the positive effects of stable marriage on crime desistance have been proved beyond doubt. I would like….....

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