Post-Release Employment of Desisting Inmates

Recent research has questioned the causal effect of employment on desistance from crime. 

The aim of the current study was to examine the post-release employment trajectories of Finnish inmates convicted to prison in 2004–05 (n = 1,998) who are desisting from crime, using varying criteria. 

While a majority of the inmates received some salary from work during the four-year follow-up, the results show that only one tenth of them were able to sustain a continued streak of employment. Instead, the proportion outside of the labour force garew with time from release. 

The results suggest that employment plays a limited role in the desistance processes in the current Finnish context. The potential causes for this finding are discussed, and avenues for future research are proposed.

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By:  Mikko Aaltonen

Mikko Aaltonen, University of Helsinki/Institute of Criminology and Legal Policy, PO Box 10 (Pitkänsillanranta 3 a), 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland; mikko.aaltonen@helsinki.fi.

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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.

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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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Mediating the Distal Crime-Drug Relationship with Proximal Reactive Criminal Thinking

This article describes the results of a study designed to test whether reactive criminal thinking (RCT) does a better job of mediating the crime → drug relationship than it does mediating the drug → crime relationship after the direct effects of crime on drug use/dependency and of drug use/dependency on crime have been rendered nonsignificant by control variables. 

All 1,170 male members of the Pathways to Desistance study (Mulvey, 2012) served as participants in the current investigation. As predicted, the total (unmediated) effects of crime on substance use/dependence and of substance use/dependence on crime were nonsignificant when key demographic and third variables were controlled, although the indirect (RCT-mediated) effect of crime on drug use was significant. Proactive criminal thinking (PCT), by comparison, failed to mediate either relationship. 

The RCT continued to mediate the crime → drug relationship and the PCT continued to not mediate either relationship when more specific forms of offending (aggressive, income) and substance use/dependence (drug use, substance-use dependency symptoms) were analyzed. This offers preliminary support for the notion that even when the total crime-drug effect is nonsignificant the indirect path from crime to reactive criminal thinking to drugs can still be significant. 

Based on these results, it is concluded that mediation by proximal reactive criminal thinking is a mechanism by which distal measures of crime and drug use/dependence are connected.

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By:  Walters GD.

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The Adolescence–Adulthood Transition and Desistance from Crime: Examining the Underlying Structure of Desistance

Describing and explaining desistance in special categories of juvenile offenders, such as chronic, serious, violent, and sexual offenders, represents a challenge for researchers and practitioners alike. In fact, there is little agreement as to how to best define and measure desistance from crime. In the current study, four conceptualizations of desistance are examined with a sample of 349 incarcerated juvenile offenders. Based on longitudinal data measured from age 12 to 23, desistance was examined through four modeling strategies. 

Results highlighted inconsistencies in classifying offenders as desisters/persisters across the modeling strategies used. Of importance, following the transition into adulthood, evidence suggests that most of these individuals were not on a life-course pattern of serious, violent, and sexual offending but rather at different stages of desistance. Based on the study findings, a unified model of desistance is proposed to describe and explain desistance from crime among juvenile offenders.

Below:  Offending trajectories of adjudicated youth from 12 to 23 years old

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/57fVHa

By:  

Patrick Lussier 

, Evan McCuish

, Raymond R. Corrado

 

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Human Agency and Explanations of Criminal Desistance: Arguments for a Rational Choice Theory

Extant theoretical work on desistance from crime has emphasized social processes such as involvement in adult social bonds or pro-social relationships, with very little attention given to individual subjective processes such as one’s identity. The desistance theories of Sampson and Laub and Giordano seem to have reached the point of consensual acceptance in the field. Theoretical work within the past 5 years, however, have begun to stress the role of identity and human agency in the desistance process including Paternoster and Bushway’s (2009) identity theory of desistance (ITD), which offers a rational choice perspective on how offenders quit crime. This paper provides a critical theoretical assessment of both the age-graded informal social control theory of desistance and the theory of cognitive and emotional transformation, illuminating the critical theoretical omissions and empirical inconsistencies in each. We suggest that the apparent consensus in the criminological literature regarding desistance theory may be premature and highlight the advantages provided by theories that emphasize the internal cognitive dimensions of change including the ITD. 

Table 1

Summary of desistance theories of crime

	Sampson and Laub	Giordano	Maruna	Paternoster and Bushway
Intellectual heritage	Social control theory	Symbolic interactionism	Phenomenology	Rational choice
Main factor in desistance	Conventional social bonds and routine activities	Emotionally healthy intimate relationships new role models	Biographical reconstruction	Identity change
Role of human agency	Very little	Role for human agency at the mid-range of disadvantage	Not clear	Human agency a fundamental part of the theory
Social/structural or individualist	Social	Social	Individualist	Individualist
Identity change part of desistance?	Not required, but may come after social bonds improve	No causal role, but may come later	Identity consistency	Identity change initiates desistance
Respectability package (full-time job and marriage) required for desistance	Yes	Helpful, but not required	Helpful, but not required	Helpful, but not required

Full article at:  http://goo.gl/0jSKRl

By: 

Ray Paternoster 

, Ronet Bachman

, Shawn Bushway

, Erin Kerrison

, Daniel O’Connell

 

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