Desistance by design : offenders' reflections on criminal justice theory, policy and practice

This article highlights the views and advice of offenders in Scotland about what helps and hinders young people generally in the process of desistance, why interventions may or may not encourage desistance and what criminal justice and other agencies can do to alleviate the problems which may result in offending. The findings suggest that probation-style supervisory relationships with workers are still the key means to promote desistance but given the fact that offenders perceive desistance to be ‘by design’ rather than ‘by default’, there still needs to be a greater emphasis placed by criminal justice and wider agencies on the structural constraints to a legal, conventional and integrated lifestyle

The `Chicken and Egg' of Subjective and Social Factors in Desistance from Crime

It is now widely acknowledged that progression from persistent offending to desistance from crime is the outcome of a complex interaction between subjective/agency factors and social/environmental factors. A methodological challenge for desistance researchers is to unravel the differential impacts of these internal and external factors and the sequence in which they come into play. Towards this, the present investigation draws on a prospective study of 130 male property offenders, interviewed in the 1990s (the Oxford Recidivism Study), and followed up 10 years later. The analysis supports a 'subjective-social model' in which subjective states measured before release have a direct effect on recidivism as well as indirect effects through their impact on social circumstances experienced after release from prison.The full-text of this article is not currently available in ORA, but you may be able to access the article via the publisher copy link on this record page. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in the European Journal of Criminology, 5(2), April 2008 by SAGE Publications Ltd. All rights reserved. © 2008 European Society for Criminology and SAGE Publications

Parents and partners in crime: a six-year longitudinal study on changes in supportive relationships and delinquency in adolescence and young adulthood

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