Assortative Mating and the Intergenerational Transmission of Parental Incarceration Risks

Abstract

Research on the intergenerational transmission of incarceration tends to focus on patrilineality,

Does the intergenerational transmission of crime depend on family complexity?

“…Step 3: Heterogeneity and robustness checks Given the markedly higher crime rates among men compared to women, the intergenerational transmission of crime often is seen as primarily operating between fathers and sons (Andersen, 2018), and we therefore present our findings by child's gender. Results for boys and girls separately (see Figure A1 in the Online Appendix) showed that although the pattern of our main findings was concentrated among boys-which is not a surprise considering how much higher conviction risks were among boys than among girls-girls also suffered the intergenerational transmission of crime.…”

“…These data consist of administrative records of a wide array of the lives of the population in Denmark, recorded by governmental as well as private agencies and reported to Statistics Denmark. All residents of Denmark have a unique personal identification number to which the administrative records are linked, allowing us to merge various types of information to individuals across different registries, such as demographic information from the population register, residence information from the housing register, and criminal records from the criminal justice registers (for additional details on Danish register data in relation to studies on the intergenerational transmission of crime, see Andersen, 2018).…”

“…But whereas studies of intergenerational transmissions in other domains of life have adapted to recent and important trends in family structures (e.g., de Leeuw et al, 2018;Erola & Jalovaara, 2017), studies of the intergenerational transmission of crime have tended to focus on biological parents and children (e.g., Andersen, 2018). To the degree that criminal behavior has a genetic component (e.g., Hjalmarsson & Lindquist, 2013), the focus on biological parents makes sense (as the genetic component is then kept constant).…”

Criminal Justice Involvement, Transition to Fatherhood, and the Demographic Foundation of the Intergenerational Transmission of Crime

“…It takes two to tango, yet the literature has often ignored the female perspective on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contacts, likely due to men's overrepresentation in criminal statistics and studies of intergenerational transmission's reliance on last names to trace familial lines (however, see Andersen, 2018a;Burgess-Proctor, Huebner, & Durso, 2016;Hjalmarsson & Lindquist, 2013;Huebner & Gustafson, 2007;Muftić, Bouffard, & Armstrong, 2016 for contributions that consider maternal transmission). Further, focus has predominantly been on heterosexual couples and single parents, which at least to some extent likely is due to the nature of available data sources.…”

“…Last, as heavily documented in the literature, fatherhood does not happen in a vacuum, may be transformative, and may initiate desistance (Kerr, Capaldi, Owen, Wiesner, & Pears, 2011). Mother's criminal behavior also matters (Hjalmarsson & Lindquist, 2013), and there are strong evidence on assortative mating along lines of criminal involvement (e.g., Andersen, 2018a;Andersen, Andersen, & Skov, 2015). All these important processes have not been thoroughly considered in this study, but future work should seek to incorporate this perspectives to paint a more detailed picture of how differences not only in fertility, but also in the family situation, are important for fully understanding intergenerational transmission at a population level.…”