Desistance for a Long-Term Drug-Involved Sample of Adult Offenders: The Importance of Identity Transformation

Using a mixed-race sample of male and female drug-involved offenders who were released from prison in the early 1990s and re-interviewed in 2009 through 2011, this article represents perhaps the first attempt to determine the utility of the identity theory of desistance (ITD) in explaining desistance in a contemporary cohort of adult drug-involved offenders. 

Supporting the ITD, interview narratives revealed that the vast majority of offenders who successfully desisted from crime and substance misuse had first transformed their offender identity into a non-offender identity. 

Although partnership and employment did not appear to be significant turning points per se for the majority of our respondents, rekindling relationships with extended family and finding living-wage employment did serve to solidify new prosocial identities once the transformation had occurred.

Purchase full article at:   http://goo.gl/aw35oc

By:  Ronet Bachman, University of Delaware

1. Erin Kerrison, University of Pennsylvania
2. Raymond Paternoster, University of Maryland
3. Daniel O’Connell, Lionel Smith, University of Delaware

1. Ronet Bachman, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716; e-mail: ronet@udel.edu.

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