Marriage and Offending: Examining the Significance of Marriage among the Children of Immigrants

Abstract

Although research shows that involvement in crime varies across immigrant generations, less is known about why this is so. Using 13 waves of National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 data, we examine the influence of marriage—a key correlate of desistance from crime—to understand more fully patterns of offending across immigrant generations during the transition to adulthood. Results indicate a lower prevalence of offending among first-generation immigrants compared with their second-generation and third-plus-generation peers; however, among active offenders, rates of offending are similar across groups. Notably, marriage exerts a significantly stronger effect on offending for second-generation immigrants, suggesting that, while assimilation may be associated with more offending, it is also associated with a greater potency of marriage in promoting desistance from crime.

Keywords::

• desistance from crime
• marriage
• immigration
• life course theory
• assimilation

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project was supported by Grant No. 2011-IJ-CX-0002 awarded by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Points of view in this document are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. Additionally, this research was conducted with restricted access to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

NOTES

Notes

¹ We prioritize information pertaining to the youth and biological parents' place of birth in assigning immigrant status. In cases where information for biological parents' country of birth was missing, we exploit information available for the biological grandparents' place of birth to code immigration status. Specifically, if all four maternal and paternal biological grandparents and the youth were born in the United States, we coded the respondent as third-plus generation. If all four maternal and paternal biological grandparents and the youth were born outside the United States, we coded the youth as first-generation immigrant. An additional 937 youth were retained in the analysis using grandparent place of birth data.

² The NLSY97 does not distinguish among crime types in the arrest measure. To assess whether our findings varied by crime type, we examined separate models using information on self-reported offending disaggregated by general (largely property offenses) and violent crimes. Results of these analyses (available upon request) are substantively similar to those reported here. However, because the self-report offending measures were not consistently measured for the full NLSY97 sample across all study waves, we focus our attention on arrest.

³ The prevalence of arrest is statistically significantly lower for: first-generation immigrants compared to second-generation immigrants in 1997; for first-generation immigrants compared with third-plus-generation immigrants in 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2008, and 2009; for second-generation immigrants compared with third-plus-generation immigrants in 2000 and 2008.

⁴ Amato et al. (2007) note that the dichotomy of institutional and individualist marriage is an artificial one. Marriages have likely always entailed a combination of both, however, to a greater or lesser extent depending upon context and historical period.

⁵ Research on immigration may also be influenced by selection bias in another way. As Tonry (1997) has argued, first-generation immigrants likely differ systematically from subsequent generations in their offending behavior simply because they chose to immigrate for the goal of improved opportunities and long-term social and economic advancement. While this presents a possible selection issue in studies of adult offending, because the selection criteria of the NLSY79 study required respondents to be 16 years of age or younger at baseline, and the majority of first-generation immigrants migrated in childhood, the potential for this type of selection bias in these data is likely nominal.