Life-Course Criminology and Desistance from Crime: What Consists of a Good Marriage and are the Effects Gender Specific?

Abstract

Criminology is the science of studying crime on individual and societal levels. The area of life-course criminology seeks to understand how an individual begins in crime, persists, and eventually desists, and how desistance is achieved throughout the entire course of a person‟s life. Desistance may be accomplished through a number of ways within the confines of a marriage, from the cultivation of a strong marriage environment with strong attachments and commitments between spouses, to marriage simply functioning as the mechanism to replace one‟s previous deviant friends. While there is a large body of knowledge explaining how desistance is achieve through marriage for men, the literature pertaining to women is very small. In addition to these gendered differences in research, the specific properties of what consists of a “good marriage” are missing from the literature to date.