Recidivism and Relationships: Examining the Role of Relationships, Transitions, and Relationship Quality in Reincarcerat
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Recidivism and Relationships: Examining the Role of Relationships, Transitions, and Relationship Quality in Reincarceration Danielle Wallace 1 Ryan Mays 1
& Matthew
Larson 2 & Logan Somers 1 & Kathleen E. Padilla 1 &
Received: 19 September 2019 / Revised: 11 May 2020 / Accepted: 17 May 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Purpose Marriage encourages desistance, yet how post-release marital transitions (i.e., marital formation and dissolution) impact reentry outcomes is not commonly studied. Romantic partnership formation and dissolution is even less frequently studied. Moreover, the impact of the quality of marital and serious romantic relationships has not yet been linked to reentry outcomes. We explore whether marriage, being in a relationship, and post-release marital and relationship transitions impact reincarceration. Methods Using data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative, we estimate a series of logistic regressions assessing whether post-release marital or relationship transitions, as well as relationship quality, influence the likelihood of reincarceration. Results We find that relationship quality, not marriage or relationship transitions, is associated with a lower likelihood of reincarceration. Being in any relationship, including a marriage, however, is associated with and increased likelihood of reincarceration. Conclusion Future research efforts should seek to shed additional light on how the reintegration process is affected by specific types of relationships and relationship transitions, as well as how relationship quality may mitigate negative reentry outcomes. Keywords Marriage . Relationships . Relationship transitions . Re-entry . Re-incarceration
. Recidivism
* Danielle Wallace [email protected]
1
School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Arizona State University, 411 N. Central Ave, Room 600, Phoenix, AZ 85050, USA
2
Department of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA
D. Wallace et al.
Introduction Given that virtually all prisoners eventually experience reentry [68], understanding how the strains of imprisonment and reentry impact recidivism has become an important topic for scholarly work. Scholars researching in this area have identified multiple factors that influence recidivism, including an offender’s age, employment status, education, housing access, neighborhood context, and criminal history [22, 28, 42, 63, 71]. There are, however, other meaningful elements of the reentry experience likely to affect recidivism that have, to date, received meager attention from reentry scholars. For instance, while marital involvement and recidivism has been well studied [5, 15, 71], the instability of marriage, the quality of relationships, and other serious romantic relationships that often accompanies an offender’s return to society [57] has been largely neglected in studies on recidivism [17]. In 2009, Visher and colleagues made the call for criminologists to better understand the implications of marriage for the reentry
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