A 70-year study of juvenile offenders born in the 1920s has found that those who married were far more likely to go straight later in life than those who remained single.

The findings challenge much of contemporary thinking on social and criminal justice policy, which focuses heavily on the importance of childhood behaviour and background as a key predictor of criminality in adulthood.

The study instead emphasises the ability of offenders to turn their lives around, given the right social circumstances. By taking morality out of the arguments in favour of marriage, the study also provides the pro-marriage lobby with powerful new ammunition.

John Laub, professor of criminology at the University of Maryland who co-wrote the study, based his research on data from 500 criminals from Boston, Massachusetts, who were sent to reform school in the 1930s and 1940s.

Fifty two of the men were reinterviewed when in their seventies, in what is the longest-running study on crime in the world.

Professor Laub, who will present his findings tomorrow at a debate organised by the relationship charity One Plus One, found that married men were 36 per cent less likely to reoffend than those who had not married.

Men who had abandoned crime in adulthood had been married for 80 per cent of their lives, usually to the same woman. Among those who continued their criminal activities, this figure was 51 per cent and many of those had divorced and remarried.

“By following these men from age seven to 70, we found that marriage was far and away the most important turning point in their lives,” Professor Laub said.

The married men did not set out to distance themselves from their former criminal activities, nor did marriage appear to have changed their moral outlook, the research showed. Instead, marriage altered their daily routines and physically removed them from the scenes of their past deviant behaviour.

“It was almost as if they dissociated themselves from crime by default,” he said. Professor Laub, whose coauthor on the study is Professor Robert Sampson, said there were at least five ways in which marriage turned men away from crime. First is the element of social control exercised by women over wayward husbands.

Strategies adopted by wives ranged from “zero-tolerance” to “management and containment”. “Women might control their husbands by telling them how many times they were allowed out drinking with their friends. “What happens then is that men’s peer groups altered.

Things probably are not that different in this respect today, in that the wife is used as a buffer,” Professor Laub said. Secondly, marriage helped turn men from crime by offering them the potential resources of another person. It also changed their routines and lifestyle and introduced new friends and family members.

“Sometimes these extended families gave them access to jobs and networks that they didn’t have before,” Professor Laub said.

Marriage also often entailed moving home, taking people away from the neighbourhoods where they had been involved in crime and often reducing opportunities for criminal activity.

Although none of the men interviewed cited parenthood as an independent factor and most regarded it simply as something that went along with marriage, it also placed new demands on their time and restructured their lives. Military service had similar influences but this was less important than the effect of marriage.

None of the men studied was in a cohabiting relationship but other research has found that while marriage reduces crime, cohabitation increases it. Although society has undergone significant changes since the Boston study began, Professor Laub believes that modern marriages still exert similar influences on men today.

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