The study produced evidence that suggests the influence of marriage in reducing criminal offending is universal in nature; the negative relationship between marriage and offending was evident across gender, socio-historical context, and gender and socio-historical context combined. For both men and women, the effect of marriage on offending was greatest in the most contemporary context. Although researchers have cautioned that due to changes occurring in opportunity structure (e.g., employment opportunities, marriage markets), individuals growing up in more contemporary contexts may be unable to profit from the benefits of salient life events such as marriage, the current study found that the benefits of marriage were strongest for the youngest, most contemporary group in the sample. The study obtained data from the Criminal Career and Life-Course Study (CCLS), a large-scale longitudinal study conducted at the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement. The CCLS is based on a representative sample of 4 percent of all cases of criminal offenses that were tried in the Netherlands in 1977 (n=4,615). The sample consisted of 4,187 men and 428 women offenders. The study design enabled the obtaining of information on offenders whose birth years ranged from 1907 to 1965. This allowed for the comparison of life course dynamics across multiple historical contexts. The data contained detailed annual records on criminal behavior and salient life events from age 12 to later adulthood. Because of the decreasing sample size at later ages, the current study reports on the analyses only for ages 12-55. 4 tables, 2 figures, and 62 references