Marriage and Crime

http://www.nomblog.com/14306

A new study has found that marriage can potentially help reduce crime because married people tend to develop significantly greater self-control.

“Self-control is one of the strongest predictors of differences between people in terms of their involvement in crime,” said Dr. Walter Forrest, Senior Lecturer in Criminology at Australia’s Monash University, in a press release from Monash University.

“Our study shows that improvements in a person’s level of self-control are related to changes in their involvement in crime over time. It also shows that marriage is a significant source of those improvements,” said Dr. Forrest.

The researchers used data from the US National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) in order to test “empirical associations between the occurrence of key life events such as marriage, employment, and military service, and desistance from crime.”

NOM's Tweet on the matter says "promote marriage btwn 1 man 1 woman" and yet the original article makes no mention of marriage being "1 man 1 woman." If NOM really did want to reduce crime, they would promote gay marriage as well.


Of course, one could point out that states that allow gay marriage (MA, IA, CT, NH, NY, VT) have relatively few prisoners per 100,000 people compared to states that ban gay marriage (Texas, Alabama, Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, Arizona). I'd like to point out that the three highest incarceration rate per 100,000 people occur in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Alabama. What do these states have in common? All of them ban same sex marriage and do not recognize other types of same sex unions. The next tier, containing Texas, Arizona, Mississippi, and Florida all ban same-sex marriage, with Arizona being the only one of those four that recognizes other types of same-sex unions.


Massachusetts and New Hampshire fall into the lowest tier of incarcerations per 100,000 people (Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004 with the court ruling Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health). New York, Vermont, and Iowa all fall into the next-lowest tier for incarcerations, with CT falling into the third-lowest tier).


Therefore, one could make the argument that the legalization of gay marriage helps to reduce the crime rate in states, if incarcerations per 100,000 population are the measure of crime in a state. I think NOM's tweet should read "Want to reduce crime? Promote same-sex marriage".