Assortative Mating and the Intergenerational Transmission of Parental Incarceration Risks

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Research on the intergenerational transmission of incarceration tends to emphasize the strong association between fathers' involvement with the criminal justice system and sons' behavioral outcomes, such as experiencing incarceration. The father–son association in incarceration risks is, however, not the only mechanism through which these risks may travel across generations. Although female rates of incarceration are generally low (even for women who experienced parental incarceration when they were girls), women could transmit incarceration risks across generations through their choice of partner. This article uses administrative data on three generations in Denmark to show that assortative mating—the nonrandom selection of partners with similar characteristics—indeed make women just as likely as men to transmit incarceration risks across generations.