Crime isn’t just a lone act of rebellion--it can be a family heirloom, handed down like a tarnished keepsake from one generation to the next. Experts call this the "intergenerational transmission of crime," a pattern driven by the gritty realities of family life: shaky parenting, chaotic homes, and the ripple effects of instability.
And for kids growing up in common law households—where couples live together without tying the knot--the odds of inheriting this troubled legacy might just be higher.
The numbers tell a compelling story. The Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development, tracking 411 boys from South London over decades, found that by age 50, 62% of those with convicted parents had their own criminal records, compared to just 34% whose parents stayed out of trouble.
But it’s not a one-off. A sweeping meta-analysis from the National Institutes of Health crunched data across studies and pegged kids of convicted parents as 2.5 times more likely to turn to crime themselves—double the risk even when factors like poverty or neighborhood are stripped out. “It’s a pattern that holds across countries and cultures,” says Dr. John Wright, a criminologist who’s dug deep into family ties.
“Something’s getting passed down.”
What exactly? Social learning tops the list. Kids watch their parents—how they act, how they solve problems. If dad settles a score with a fist or mom lifts cash from a till, that’s a lesson absorbed early. A 2017 study in PLOS ONE found that kids of convicted parents often mirror specific behaviors--like theft or violence--suggesting they’re not just stumbling into crime, but copying it.
in disrupted homes—yelling matches, absent figures—and the stage is set. “It’s not just about genes,” Wright explains. “It’s the environment: seeing crime normalized, or growing up with inconsistent rules. That sticks.”
Direct head-to-head data pitting married families against common law ones on kids’ criminal odds is scarce, but the clues pile up. Stable, two-parent homes--usually married--tend to churn out fewer delinquents than fractured or solo-parent setups, research shows.
Marriage, with its legal glue and social weight, seems to offer a shield that cohabitation struggles to match. A study on parental supportiveness drove the point home: in steady families, warm, engaged parenting cut down on kids’ behavior issues—the kind that can snowball into crime. Common law couples, more prone to splitting, often can’t keep that buffer intact
“It’s not about judging lifestyles,” Thompson cautions. “It’s about what instability does to a child’s world—emotional insecurity, spotty discipline, the pull of bad influences. That’s where the risk creeps in.”
For now, the evidence paints a stark picture. Crime runs deep in families, fed by dynamics that common law relationships—unsteady as they often are—might worsen. It’s a generational hand-me-down no one wants, yet too many inherit. Breaking that chain, it seems, starts where it all begins: at home.
