Partners and Crime: Contemporary Unions and Desistance from Crime During the Transition to Adulthood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The age-graded theory of informal social control, one of the most influential theories in life-course criminology, purports that marriage is a “turning point” that can discourage offending and explain desistance from crime during the transition to adulthood. However, this theory was developed using a sample of white men who came of age over half a century ago. Since that era, marriage is delayed and increasingly forgone in favour of cohabitation, yet little is known about how cohabitation influences crime. This dissertation updates and extends the theory by examining how contemporary romantic partnerships influence offending, and whether these effects generalize across the intersection of gender and race. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997) and employing multilevel models with inverse probability of treatment weights, I estimate the causal effects of cohabitation and marriage on self-reported offending throughout the transition to adulthood. I find that cohabitation does not influence the offending behaviour of white, black, or Hispanic men and women. Although marriage deters offending among some subpopulations, these results suggest that future research in this area must take seriously the scope of the age-graded theory’s generalizability and attend to other scope conditions in addition to gender and race. Furthermore, marriage today is much less common and tends to occur later in the life-course than for previous cohorts. Thus, marriage, and partnering in general, may no longer be powerful explanations of desistance at the population-level or of the “age-crime curve”. The social contexts that bond young adults to society during the transition to adulthood are more heterogeneous and complex than for past cohorts, but the stability of the age-crime curve suggests that these social bonds continue to exert informal social control that promotes desistance from crime. Further research should investigate these complex social contexts to understand the contemporary desistance process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".