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As the number of men incarcerated in the United States increases, the likelihood of women marrying decreases, said Kerwin Charles, Steans Family Professor in Education Policy at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies. “The effect is not small and tends to be much bigger for women without education,” Charles explained during a Becker Brown Bag Series presentation hosted by the Becker Center on Chicago Price Theory at the Charles M. Harper Center November 14. Charles is a visiting professor for 2007-08 at the Becker Center.
Among women who marry, the probability of marrying “down”- or marrying a man with less education - is significantly greater as incarceration rises, he said. Given the same increase in incarceration, the likelihood of marrying “up,” or to a man with more education, declines, noted Charles. “The probability of marrying down is much, much larger for black women.”
Of the 2.2 million men incarcerated in the United States, 1.1 million are African Americans. Charles quoted figures that indicated 97 percent of African Americans who marry wed other African Americans, while 95 percent of white women who marry wed white men, he said.
As a possible rational response to the shifts in the marriage market, women have increased their total years of schooling by 7 percent since incarceration rates began to rise. “Virtually none of these numbers, incidentally, are college attendance,” he said. “Much of this is completing high school.”
How this shift in the market affects men who are not incarcerated is more difficult to assess. If “bad men” are removed from the market by incarceration, logically the remaining men must be better on average, he said. “It’s not clear what I ought to expect. If I’m one of the ‘good guys’ and my competition is reduced,” he said. “I could get married. But nothing we know about men suggests they want to get married.”
Consequently, as incarceration rises, men are instead 13 percent less likely to ever marry. Meanwhile, Charles pointed out that they are 8 percent more likely to increase their education, but less likely to work for pay. “If it’s the case that I’m mechanically taking the worst guys away, you would have thought that the ones who were left behind were the good ones who were working more,” he said. “I’m finding they, in fact, work less and this finding is pretty stable across statistical specifications.”
One important consideration in Charles’s research is whether incarcerated men are actually removed from the market or whether they eventually return.“It’s not like the guys go to jail and never come back,” he said. “I don’t deal with the dynamics of that at all. That’s an important area for future work.”
Another important consideration is identifying adjustments that occur in the market as a result of these demographic shifts. “If the kind of guys I used to marry are disappearing, I might shift the kind of guys I marry,” he said. “For example, I might marry across race. But there is zero evidence of that. That actually should be happening. Why it is not, I don’t know.”
- Phil Rockrohr