With or Without You? Contextualizing the Impact of Romantic Relationship Breakup on Crime Among Serious Adolescent Offenders

The Relationship Between Family Member Incarceration, Criminal Offending, and Victimization

Mass incarceration has significantly impacted families nationwide. Recent evidence suggests that at least 45% of Americans have experienced the incarceration of an immediate family member (Enns et al., 2019). Prior evidence has demonstrated that adolescents and young adults who experience family member incarceration experience increases in criminogenic outcomes. However, less is known about whether family member incarceration contributes to increases in victimization and if it occurs indirectly through increases in offending. To address this question, the current study uses 10 waves of the Pathways to Desistance Study, which is a longitudinal study that followed justice-involved youth over 7 years (N = 8,346 person waves). Using fixed-effects negative binomial regression, findings demonstrate that experiencing familial incarceration is associated with increases in victimization and that criminal offending may be one mechanism that indirectly explains this relationship. Policy and programming implications are further discussed.

A Grounded Theory Model of Relationship Decision-Making in Non-Offending Partners of Individuals Accused of Sexual Offending

Non-offending partners of individuals who have committed sexual offenses often choose to end their relationship given the many negative consequences they face as a result of their partner's offending behavior. Despite a focus on relationships in rehabilitation frameworks and the importance of the relationship for the individual who has offended and their partner, research has thus far failed to examine the process underlying why non-offending partners decide to stay in or leave their relationship following an offense. In this study we developed the first descriptive model of relationship decision-making in non-offending partners. Twenty-three individuals whose current or previous partners were accused of sexual offending were interviewed about affective, behavioral, cognitive, and contextual factors contributing to their decision to stay with or leave their partner. Participants' narrative accounts were analyzed using Grounded Theory. Our resulting model consists of four main periods: (1) background factors, (2) relationship factors, (3) finding out, and (4) relationship decision-making. Clinical implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

Adolescent Peer and Parent Relationships Into Emerging Adulthood

Threats to adolescent and young adult health and well-being come primarily from behavior and life choices. The purpose of this study was to understand the role that peer and parent relationships have on reckless and deviant behaviors during the transition from adolescence to emerging adulthood. Select Wave I and Wave III variables from the Add Health database were studied. Adolescent reckless behavior was significantly associated with emerging adult deviant behavior, Wald χ²(1, N = 4,615) = 105, p < .001, β = 0.152, SE(β) = 0.015 Adolescent reckless behavior increases the probability of emerging adult deviant behavior among adolescents having lower scores on the quality of peer relationships, Wald χ²(1, N = 4,615) = 56, p < .001, β = 0.062, SE(β) = 0.008, and the quality of parent relationships, Wald χ²(1, N = 4,545) = 36, p < .001 β = 0.052, SE(β) = 0.009.

Marriage, Cohabitation, and Crime: Differentiating associations by partnership stage

A wealth of scholarship generally finds that marriage protects against crime, but there is less consistent evidence for cohabitation. In this article, we contribute to scholarship on marriage and put forward new evidence about cohabitation by examining marital and cohabiting partnerships as transitions with distinct stages of entry, stability, and dissolution. We use within-person change models with contemporary data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 to analyze these stages for the full sample and separately for men and women. The findings show differential protective associations of marriage and cohabitation depending on the stage of the partnership. Both recently formed cohabiting partnerships and stable cohabiting partnerships are associated with reductions in the level of offending, although to a lesser degree than marital relationships. Cohabiting partnerships that are stable, in that they have lasted at least a year, are associated with larger decreases in offending, particularly among women.

Interpersonal Relationships as Protective and Risk Factors for Psychopathy: A Follow-up Study in Adolescent Offenders

Friendships and romantic relationships may function as protective and risk factors for psychopathic traits. To better understand potential causal associations, we investigated whether within-individual changes in relationship characteristics were related to changes in psychopathic traits over time. Data were derived from ten repeated measurements of the Pathways to Desistance longitudinal study of 1354 offending adolescents (14.3% female; 40.1% Black). Analyses were adjusted for age, gender, ethnicity, self-reported offending and living facilities. Relationships of high quality were associated with lower psychopathic traits, whereas antisocial behavior and antisocial influence in relationships were related to higher psychopathic traits. Within-individual analysis indicated that time-invariant individual characteristics did not confound these associations. The findings suggest that the quality and antisocial activities of interpersonal relationships can affect positively or negatively on the levels of psychopathy.