When does the Apple Fall from the Tree? Static Versus Dynamic Theories Predicting Intergenerational Transmission of Convictions

Criminal behavior of parents substantially affects the criminal behavior of children. Little is known, however, about how crime is transmitted from one generation to the next. In order to test two possible explanations against each other, we pose the question whether the timing of the criminal acts of fathers is important for children’s chances of committing crime. Static theories predict that it is the number of delinquent acts performed by fathers that is important, and that the particular timing does not affect the child’s chance of committing crime. Dynamic theories state that the timing is important, and children have a greater chance of committing crime in the period after fathers have committed delinquent acts. Results show that the total number of convictions of a father is indeed very important, but also the exact timing is key to understanding intergenerational transmission of crime. In the year a father is convicted the chance his child is also convicted increases substantially and it decays in subsequent years. This decay takes longer the more crimes father has committed. Our results show that some of the assumptions of the static theories at least need to be adjusted.     

The Incapacitation Effect of First-Time Imprisonment: A Matched Samples Comparison

Objectives

The logic of incapacitation is the prevention of crime via the forced removal of known offenders from the community. The challenge is to provide a plausible estimate of how many crimes an incarcerated individual would have committed, were s/he free in the community rather than confined in prison. The objective of this study is to provide estimates of the incapacitation effect of first-time imprisonment from a sample of convicted offenders.

Methods

The data are official criminal records of all individuals convicted in The Netherlands in 1997. Two different analytical strategies are used to estimate an incapacitation effect. First, the offending rate of the imprisoned individuals prior to their confinement in 1997 provides a “within-person counterfactual”. Second, imprisoned offenders are paired with comparable non-imprisoned offenders using the method of propensity score matching in order to estimate a “between-person counterfactual”. Incapacitation estimates are provided separately for juvenile imprisonment (ages 12–17) as well as adult imprisonment (ages 18–50), and for male and female offenders.

Results

The best estimate is that 1 year of incarceration prevents between 0.17 and 0.21 convictions per year. The use of additional data sources indicates that this corresponds to between roughly 2.0 and 2.5 criminal offenses recorded by the police.

Conclusions

The current results suggest that, insofar as imprisonment is used with the primary goal of reducing crime through incapacitation, a general increase in the use of incarceration as the sanction of choice is not likely to yield major crime control benefits.     

Criminal defendants' satisfaction with lawyers: perceptions of procedural fairness and effort of the lawyer

At present, procedural justice theory has predominantly been used to explain defendants' satisfaction with the police, courts and prisons. It is unclear to what extent this theory is also applicable to lawyers. This study investigates to what extent (1) criminal defendants are satisfied with their lawyers and (2) procedural fairness characteristics and the effort of the lawyer are related to defendants' satisfaction with their lawyers. Data from the Prison Project were used: a large-scale research project among Dutch criminal defendants (N = 1479). Results suggest that generally, Dutch defendants are very satisfied with their lawyers. Variation in defendants' satisfaction with their lawyers can be attributed for a substantial part to procedural fairness characteristics.     

Why longer prison terms fail to serve a specific deterrent effect: an empirical assessment on the remembered severity of imprisonment

For a prison sentence to exert a specific deterrent effect, the ultimate question is that imprisonment is remembered as aversive once the offender is released, and is contemplating future criminal activities. Drawing on insights from social psychology and cognition, this study assessed (1) how inmates remember the severity of their imprisonment following release, and (2) how the severity as experienced while being incarcerated (e.g. the worst or the last moment) affects its recollected aversiveness among a sample of Dutch inmates who were released for approximately six months (n?=?696). The findings indicated that the severity as experienced while being incarcerated is strongly related to the severity as recollected following release, net of the duration of confinement. Strikingly, to the extent that the length of imprisonment affected its recollected aversiveness, it did so in the opposite direction than traditional deterrence research presumes. Implications for correctional policy and future research are discussed.     

The Impact of Imprisonment on Marriage and Divorce: A Risk Set Matching Approach

Marriage has a prominent place in criminological theory and research as one institution that has the potential to genuinely foster desistance from a criminal career. Mass imprisonment policies in the United States and elsewhere, therefore, pose a potential threat of increased crime if they impede the ability of ex-prisoners to reintegrate into society by stigmatizing them and limiting their chances in the marriage market. We use a long-term study of a conviction cohort in The Netherlands to ascertain the effect that first-time imprisonment has on the likelihood of marriage and divorce. The results suggest that the effect of imprisonment on the likelihood of marriage (among unmarried offenders) is largely a selection artifact, although there is very weak evidence for a short-lived impact that does not persist past the first year post-release. This is interpreted as a residual incapacitation effect. On the other hand, the results strongly suggest that the experience of incarceration leads to a substantially higher divorce risk among offenders who are married when they enter prison.     

Measuring Long Term Individual Trajectories of Offending Using Multiple Methods

Criminal career researchers and developmental criminologists have identified describing individual trajectories of offending over time as a key research question. In response, recently various statistical methods have been developed and used to describe individual offending patterns over the life-course. Two approaches that are prominent in the current literature are standard growth curve modeling (GCM) and group-based trajectory models (GTM). The goal of this paper is to explore ways in which these different models with different sets of assumptions, do in fact lead to different outcomes on individual trajectories. Using a particularly rich dataset, the criminal career and life-course study, we estimate a unique trajectory for each individual in the sample using the GCM and GTM. We also estimate separate trajectories for each individual directly using the long time series. We then compare these three separate trajectories for each individual. We find that the average trajectories obtained from the different approaches match each other. However, for any given individual, these approaches tell very different stories. For example, each method identifies a rather different set of individuals as desistors. This comparison highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and more broadly, it reveals the uncertainty involved with measuring long term patterns of change in latent propensity to commit crimes.

Homicide-suicide and other violent deaths: an international comparison

Homicides followed by the suicide of the perpetrator constitute a serious form of interpersonal violence. Until now no study has directly compared homicide-suicides to other violent deaths from multiple countries, allowing for a better understanding of the nature of these violent acts. Using country-specific data, this study describes and compares the incidence and patterns of homicide-suicide as well as the relationship between homicide-suicide, homicide, suicide and domestic homicide in the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States. The results indicate that cross-nationally, homicide-suicides are more likely than other types of lethal violence to involve a female victim, multiple victims, take place in a residential setting and to be committed by a firearm. Although homicide-suicides display many similarities across the different countries, differences exist regarding age and the use of firearms in the offence. This study indicates that homicides followed by suicides differ from both homicides and suicides in similar ways internationally. Cross-national differences in the availability of firearms may explain the international variation of homicide-suicide rates and patterns.     

“Because You’re Mine, I Walk the Line”? Marriage, Spousal Criminality, and Criminal Offending Over the Life Course

Objectives

This study is an analysis of the relationship between marriage and crime in a high-risk sample of Dutch men and women. Marriages are classified as to whether the spouse had been convicted of a crime prior to the marriage, in order to ascertain if one??s criminal career after marriage unfolds differently depending on the criminal history of one??s spouse.

Methods

Data are from the Criminal Career and Life-Course Study, a random sample of all individuals convicted of a criminal offense in the Netherlands in 1977 (N?=?4,615). Lifetime criminal histories for all subjects are constructed from age 12 to calendar year 2003. Official marriage records are also consulted, and the criminal history of all spouses are similarly constructed. Fixed-effects Poisson models are estimated to quantify the relationship between marriage, spousal criminality, and conviction frequency, controlling for age, parenthood, prior conviction, and prior incarceration.

Results

Among men, marriage reduces the frequency of criminal conviction, but only if the marriage is to a non-convicted spouse. Marriage to a convicted spouse, on the other hand, is indistinguishable from singlehood??it neither discourages nor promotes criminal behavior. Among women, marriage has a crime-reducing effect, regardless of the criminal history of the spouse. A set of preliminary follow-up analyses suggests further that men with more extensive criminal histories, and with more stable marriages, benefit in a more pronounced way from marriage to a non-convicted spouse. However, even unstable marriages to non-convicted spouses appear to reduce conviction frequency while they last.

Conclusions

Marriage is indeed a salient transition in the criminal career, but there are important differences depending on the characteristics of the offender (gender, criminal history), the characteristics of the spouse (criminal history), and the characteristics of the marriage (duration). The authors conclude that while marriage matters, it does not necessarily mean the end of a criminal career, and that processes of both partner selection and partner influence deserve close attention by marriage-crime researchers. Qualifications of the study??s findings include the use of conviction data from official sources, the use of a sample of men and women who were all convicted of a crime at some point in their lives, the study of legal marriage in the Netherlands, and the inability to measure potential mechanisms for the observed marriage effects.