Incarceration, Marital Uncertainty, and the Transition to Marriage among New Parents

Bryan L. Sykes, University of California, Berkeley

The mark of a criminal record has profound effects on a person's employment opportunities and is believed to adversely impact one's position in the marriage market. In this paper I examine the effect of incarceration on the transition to marriage over the life-course using panel data from the Fragile Families and Well-Being Study. I present a causal model of incarceration and marriage that focuses on latent criminal propensities and marital uncertainty prior to incarceration. By comparing never-incarcerated criminals to ever-incarcerated criminals, I am able to net out the effect of incarceration on marital probabilities through the identification of criminal behaviors. Additionally, I am able to examine the effect of criminal dispositions on transitioning to marriage for never incarcerated populations. My model allows researchers to minimize measurement error, and my findings have significant implications for marriage market research that controls for incarceration rates without identifying latent criminal propensities and martial uncertainty.