Age Gradient in Women’s Crime: The Role of Welfare Reform

• Author: Dhaval M. Dave,Hope Corman,Nancy E. Reichman
• DOI: 10.1177/1557085121991670
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

2021, Vol. 16(5) 631 –657

https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085121991670

Feminist Criminology

© The Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/1557085121991670

journals.sagepub.com/home/fcx

Article

Age Gradient in Women’s

Crime: The Role of Welfare

Reform

Hope Corman1,2 , Dhaval M. Dave3,4,

and Nancy E. Reichman5

Abstract

We investigate how welfare reform in the U.S. in the 1990s shaped the age gradient

in women’s property crime arrests. Using Federal Bureau of Investigation data, we

investigated the age-patterning of effects of welfare reform on women’s arrests for

property crime, the type of crime that welfare reform has been shown to affect. We

found that welfare reform reduced women’s property crime arrests by about 4%,

with particularly strong effects for women ages 25 to 29, slightly stronger effects in

states with stricter work incentives, and much stronger effects in states with high per

capita criminal justice expenditures.

Keywords

connections with welfare system, economic marginality, female criminality, women

and social policy, women’s desistance, age gradient

Social scientists have been studying age patterns of crime and arrest rates for decades,

both to increase understanding of criminal behavior and to inform public policy. A

strong and dominant finding has been that criminal behavior declines with age after

increasing during adolescence, although there are some deviations from this pattern

across time and place and the peak ages and rates of decline vary by type of crime

(Ulmer & Steffensmeier, 2014). Because the majority of crimes are committed by

1Rider University, Lawrenceville, NJ, USA

2NBER

3Bentley University, Waltham, MA, USA

4NBER and IZA

5Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

Corresponding Author:

Hope Corman, Department of Economics, Rider University, 2083 Lawrenceville R., Lawrenceville, NJ

08648, USA.

Email: corman@rider.edu

991670FCXXXX10.1177/1557085121991670Feminist CriminologyCorman et al.

research-article2021

632 Feminist Criminology 16(5)

2 Feminist Criminology 00(0)

men, most research on the age-crime gradient has pertained to men, despite the fact

that the criminal behavior of women has been increasing both in absolute terms and

relative to men (Campaniello, 2014).

Building on seminal qualitative work by Carlen (1988), a body of research on

gender differences in criminal behavior points to changes in economic opportunity

structures as determinants of women’s crime. Steffensmeier (1993) found that wom-

en’s arrest rates for larceny, fraud, forgery and embezzlement about doubled between

1960 and 1990, and posited that economic hardship (e.g., as a result of out-of-wed-

lock births) creates pressure for women to commit economic crimes. Heimer (2000)

pointed to the erosion of the U.S. welfare safety net as an important factor in the

economic marginalization of women and hypothesized that the desire to take care of

children is an important factor in women’s crime. Steffensmeier and Haynie (2000)

found that area-level structural disadvantage—poverty, joblessness, and female-

headed households—was associated with higher arrest rates for index crimes includ-

ing homicide, robbery, assault, burglary and larceny1 among both men and women.

A review article found that employment and fear of job loss affect women’s deci-

sions to desist from crime (McIvor et al., 2004), and a study of female offenders

found that poverty status increases the odds of re-arrest or supervision violation,

with housing support reducing the odds of recidivism (Holtfreter et al., 2004). This

literature suggests that a major change in economic opportunity structures, such as

welfare reform in the U.S., would affect women’s economic crime and that the

effects are likely to vary by age.

The 1996 U.S. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act

(PRWORA) ended entitlement to welfare under Aid to Families with Dependent

Children (AFDC) and replaced the AFDC program with Temporary Assistance for

Needy Families (TANF) block grants to states. This national legislation and policies in

many states earlier in the 1990s (collectively referred to as welfare reform) were

designed to permanently reduce dependence on cash assistance by promoting employ-

ment of women at risk of relying on welfare. The key strategies underpinning the

legislation were work requirements and time limits as conditions for receipt of cash

assistance; these strategies strongly incentivized women at risk for relying on public

assistance (not just welfare recipients) to secure employment, by reducing the benefits

of welfare reliance compared to work and eliminating the practical option of long-term

reliance on public assistance. Welfare reform was considered successful in that wel-

fare caseloads plunged by 73% between 1994 and 2019 (Meyer & Floyd, 2020), with

substantial coinciding increases in employment of low-skilled women (Fang & Keane,

2004; Ziliak, 2016).

Corman et al. (2014) exploited changes in the implementation of welfare reform

across states and over time to estimate causal effects of welfare reform in the U.S. on

adult women’s arrests. Using monthly state-level data on arrest rates compiled by the

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in conjunction with dates of state welfare reform

implementation and other relevant factors, the authors found that welfare reform led to

decreases in women’s arrests for property crimes (by 4–5%), but that it did not affect

arrests for other types of crimes. These effects were noteworthy considering recent