Does One Size Fit All? Contingencies in the Marriage-Desistance Link Among Black Women

• In Event: 570 - Section on Crime, Law and Deviance Paper Session. Sex, Gender, and Crime, Law, and Deviance

Abstract

Scholars working in the life course tradition have amassed considerable support for the notion that certain turning points, such as marriage, promote desistance. However, this body of work has largely neglected the intersection of race and gender, and more specifically, the unique social position of black females. The primary aim of this study is to contribute to the broader criminological literature on desistance by examining factors that may condition the link between a well recognized correlate of desistance (e.g., marriage) and offending. Specifically, we draw from Unnever and Gabbidon’s (2011) recent theory of African American offending to test the proposition that black women’s structural position, which includes economic marginalization and discrimination, attenuates potential benefits of marriage on criminal desistance. To this end, we take advantage of the Woodlawn data set, which provides rich longitudinal data on the offending patterns of a community cohort of African Americans who were in first grade in 1966. While, contrary to our expectations, we find no evidence that institutional discrimination moderates the marriage-crime link in this sample, we stress the need for future research to take seriously the conditions under which racialized and gendered experiences shape pathways into and out of crime and map out fruitful avenues for this research.

Authors

• Stephanie DiPietro, University of Maryland

• Elaine Eggleston Doherty, Johns Hopkins University

• Bianca E. Bersani, University of Massachusetts-Boston