Desistance and Development: the Psychosocial Process of 'going Straight'

[[[]]] That most young offenders eventually 'mature' out of deviant behaviour is one of the most well-known findings in criminology. What is less well known is what this change process involves. It is argued that this lack of understanding stems from the shortcomings of the traditional criminological framework for examining desistance and other phenomena. Narrative studies is suggested as an alternative framework for investigating the human change process, and an example is provided of a research project in Liverpool that is employing these methods. The good news is that most juvenile delinquents are leading quite successful lives by the age of 32. (Farrington, 1995). Few phenomena in criminology are as widely acknowledged and as poorly understood as desistance from crime. For most individuals, participation in 'street crimes' generally begins in the early teenage years, peaks in late adolescence or young adulthood, and ends before the person reaches 30 or 40 years of age. This pattern emerges in studies using diverse methodology (Farrington, 1986; Hindelang, 1981; Rowe and Tittle, 1977; Sullivan, 1989) and some argue that it has remained virtually unchanged for about 150 years (Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990). At least as far back as 1915, Goring called this age-crime relationship a 'law of nature'. Criminal behaviour seems to be largely a young person's activity. At some point in their life course, usually between 18 and 35 years of age, even serious offenders tend to undergo what Wolfgang et al. (1972) describe as 'spontaneous remission', where criminal behaviour seems to cease. Yet, traditional criminological theories have no easy explanation for the process of desistance from crime, and in fact tend to imply that a person's criminal behaviour should increase over time (Gove, 1985; Moffitt, 1993). Hirschi and Gottfredson (1983) argue that the relationship between age and crime 'easily qualifies as the most difficult fact in the field.' Moffitt (1993) concurs, calling the 'mysterious' age-crime relationship "at once the most robust and least understood empirical observation in the field of criminology" (p. 675). This paper is intended to address the 'social and cognitive processes' (Graham and Bowling, 1995) and the 'complex interplay between objective and subjective contingencies' (Gartner and Piliavin, 1988) involved in 'going straight' or desistance from crime. Previous research (e.g. Graham and Bowling, 1995) has addressed the question of who is most likely to desist (whites/non-whites; males/females) and when this change is likely to occur in the life course. Much less is known about how and why desistance is possible for those individuals who do eventually desist, and how social scientists can conceptualise this process.