Causal Inference via Natural Experiments and Instrumental Variables: The Effect of “Knifing Off” from the Past
نویسنده
چکیده
According to Laub and Sampson (2003), desistance from crime is made possible by “knifing off”—“offenders desist in response to structurally induced turning points that serve as the catalyst for sustaining long-term behavioral change” (p. 149). What turning points create are new situations that allow individuals to knife off the past, in part, by changing those routine activity patterns that led to trouble with the law prior to incarceration (Sampson and Laub, 2005). This idea is straightforward, but the corresponding intervention is extraordinarily complex, as the crippling expenditures on imprisonment and parole and the alarming recidivism rates in the United States clearly reveal.1 How is knifing off achieved? Laub and Sampson (2003) examine the importance of marriage and military service as turning points in the life course that enabled men in their sample to knife off from their past and then desist from crime. Marriage, in part, promotes desistance from crime because it produces changes in individual’s routine activities, including reduction of time spent in unstructured activities and in association with criminal peers (see also Warr, 1998). Yet the marriage–crime association may be spurious. For instance, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) offer a competing explanation for the observed negative relationship between marriage and crime found in countless studies. They contend that criminals are shortsighted and that the low level of self-control associated with criminality also causes individuals to discount the long-term benefits of commitments like marriage in favor of short-term gratifications. Ultimately, the marriage–crime association may be spurious, with each 9
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