Desistance from Crime

Abstract

Desistance from crime, or the cessation of criminal behavior by offenders, is an important area of study in the social sciences. While the penal system serves primarily punitive ends, desistance is achieved through broader measures, as it is influenced by social and economic factors more than by simply creating negative consequences for criminal behavior. Desistance is made more likely by strong social ties both at home (especially marital bonds) and at work, which has ramifications for employment policies, whereas recidivism—the return to crime—is made more likely by incarceration and by punitive actions taken against juvenile offenders.

Overview

Desistance from crime is the cessation of criminal behavior by prior offenders, and desistance theory is the study (in criminology and sociology) of the factors contributing to the likelihood and success of desistance. Recidivism—the return to criminal activity (or, in some contexts, drug or alcohol abuse independent of legality) after having already faced consequences such as arrest or imprisonment—is a key area of focus in the study of criminal activity. While the public tends to be most aware of efforts aimed at deterrence (discouraging criminal activity from occurring the first time), incapacitation (rendering criminal offense impossible by a particular subject, such as through imprisonment), and punishment, rehabilitation efforts encouraging desistance are considered one of the most important aspects of criminal justice by many experts.

The concept of desistance is central to the field of life-course or developmental criminology, the study of criminal or problematic behaviors over the course of an individual's life and of the factors which inform them. The basic form of a desistance study is a longitudinal one: a study that gathers data from the same subjects over a long period of time, including information about criminal activity as well as relevant biographical material such as employment, education, social connections, and any areas of interest specific to the study. Studies of desistance may focus on desistance from crime in general, on specific types of activity (frequently drug abuse, domestic violence, or sexual assault), or on disengagement with crime-based subcultures such as gangs. Gang desistance is an especially vital area of concern because of the connections between desistance and social bonds, and between social bonds and gang affiliation.

Further Insights

Research has long shown that one of the key factors increasing the likelihood of desistance is the individual's forming strong social bonds, typically through both work and family. Work correlating desistance with age has generally recapitulated this point; that is, studies that show a correlation between desistance and specific age ranges seem to do so primarily because those age ranges represent points of life where social bonds are strongest. For example, younger people are less likely to be married, and less likely to have strong, resilient marriages if they are married. Because numerous studies show that when couples marry young, they are significantly more likely to divorce, this generalization holds true even when speaking of young married people.

Similarly, younger people are also less likely to hold jobs in which they have long-term social bonds with coworkers, for the simple reason that it is less likely that they have held the same job for an appreciable amount of time, compared with a fiftysomething who may have worked for the same company for twenty or thirty years. Further, some researchers believe that factors contributing to desistance or recidivism differ for male and female offenders. This means that results from wholly or primarily male studies do not necessarily reflect factors for female offenders.

These observations have led to two overlapping but not identical areas of concern. First and most obviously, if desistance is statistically most difficult for young offenders because they have not had the opportunity to form strong social bonds—which is especially true for young offenders who have spent time in prison, since even a sentence of two or three years represents a large chunk of their adult life—then efforts at increasing desistance need to focus on young offenders or at least offer solutions specific to their circumstances.

Second, even a cursory consideration of the link between social bonds and desistance leads to the realization that when societal treatment of offenders makes it more difficult to integrate into society, recidivism becomes more likely. Criminal offenders regularly face both formal and informal, systemic and personal, discrimination as a result of their criminal convictions. The most severe such discrimination is faced by people convicted of felonies. In some states, ex-felons may be barred from voting, one of the most fundamental American rights; in many, they are prevented from serving on juries or holding public office. These limitations are not trivial, nor is the population they impact: after the much-scrutinized 2000 presidential election, one of the facts revealed was that a full 2% of the population was unable to vote due to such restrictions.

Furthermore, though former offenders are not prohibited from work (except for specific jobs which are barred to ex-felons or to people convicted of specific kinds of crimes), it is much more difficult for them to obtain employment. Employers commonly ask applicants to disclose whether they have been convicted of a crime, and many employers conduct criminal background checks before offering an applicant a position. This has several effects: first, applicants who have been convicted of crimes have more trouble finding work than equally qualified applicants who have not, which in turn makes it more difficult to integrate into society, to find financial security, and to form strong social bonds; second, applicants with criminal backgrounds sometimes wind up concentrated in jobs offered by employers willing to hire people with criminal records, which can result in recidivism-prone social networks formed of other former offenders.

Beginning in the 1990s and expanded after the 2007 recession, the "Ban the Box" movement has attempted to make employers stop asking about criminal background for these reasons. San Francisco, New York City, and New Jersey have enacted "fair chance" laws, and other states may follow. An unfortunate side effect of banning criminal background checks may be increased racial discrimination in hiring practices. Several studies have indicated that when employers could not conduct criminal background checks of applicants, they responded by hiring disproportionately fewer African American applicants.

What work and home issues have in common is relatively simple: desistance is encouraged by stability. The ramifications of this fact are important and complicated. Economic inequality in the United States grew steadily over the twentieth century, and continues to grow in the twenty-first. While the correlation between economic class (as represented by income, wealth, and family background) and likelihood of conviction is often oversimplified by pointing out that wealthy people are better able to afford expert legal representation, there is more to the correlation than that.

Wealthy people enjoy more stability than the poor. They may have more stable marriages—money is the most common issue of contention in a marriage. They are less likely to live with untreated health conditions or bear serious debt because of health care expenses. They are more likely to be educated, and to have been able to focus on school full-time rather than splitting time between school and work, or between school and raising a family. And if convicted, they are better able to survive post-incarceration employment difficulties. Wealth, whether personal or familial, provides resilience in the face of hardship, and although the United States is overall a prosperous country, the divide between the haves and have-nots has not shortened in response to that prosperity, but instead has widened; that is, the wealthier the country as a whole, the larger the proportion of that wealth controlled by a very small segment at the top.

Issues

The role of drug use in recidivism is an important area of concern. Because of the steady increase in penalties for drug-related crimes, as well as in mandatory minimum sentences, from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century, the largest category of prisoners in either state or federal prison consists of inmates serving sentences for drug offenses. About a quarter of prisoners—the exact proportion varies by state and by definitions used in different studies—are nonviolent offenders, which means there is no public safety rationale to their imprisonment: whereas the incapacitation of violent offenders through removing them from society is predicated on the fact that imprisoning them leaves them unable to do more harm to others, no such justification obtains for the imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders.

Rationales for the imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders include deterrence and rehabilitation. Imprisoning a nonviolent offender can, in theory, deter future crimes by demonstrating and reinforcing the negative consequences of those crimes. Imprisoning someone for a drug offense can provide an opportunity for treatment and rehabilitation. In the latter case, though, the practical fact is that in most prisons, few resources are spent on effective rehabilitation efforts; this is even more true of the increasingly common privately run prisons, as the for-profit model of such prisons must consider cost savings against any benefit to the public good from rehabilitation.

Concerns over imprisoning nonviolent drug offenders go beyond notions of fairness and mercy. It is commonly accepted by social scientists that one important reason that recidivism is so high among former prisoners—as distinct from former offenders, regardless of incarceration—is that incarceration itself contributes to recidivism. Offenders without prior social ties to the criminal world when entering prison can exit with a significant social network of offenders. They may be pressured to join gangs for protection while in prison, and may exit prison with these social ties and gang affiliations intact, or owing favors to gang members or leaders in exchange for the protection that was offered to them. These social ties become more important once the released offender faces the difficulties of integrating into society outside prison, securing employment, reviving or creating new social ties, and so forth.

For these reasons, many criminal justice experts and sociologists insist that there should not be a one-size-fits-all approach to crime. One alternative is the institution of drug courts, the first of which opened in Miami in 1989 and are used in every state. Drug courts are judicial courts that deal with nonviolent drug offenders in ways that avoid traditional incarceration as a solution. Not every nonviolent drug offender has the ability to have their case heard by a drug court rather than a traditional criminal court, however; fewer than ten percent of those eligible for drug court hearings are heard in drug courts, despite the fact that the recidivism rate for drug court defendants is much lower than for traditional criminal court defendants.

Juvenile drug courts are an especially important component in desistance efforts. One of the consequences of the War on Drugs was the shift to more severe penalties for drug use by minors, both by the courts and by educational institutions. Numerous schools responded to perceptions of problematic levels of drug use with zero-tolerance policies. These policies worked against the natural tendency of most juvenile offenders to desist from crime in adulthood by creating what critics termed the school-to-prison pipeline—that is, an official course of action that results in individuals aging out of the public-school system and into the prison system. Zero-tolerance policies and related educational and juvenile court policies have the effect of marking juvenile offenders apart from their peers, and studies uphold the idea that juveniles are more impacted than adults by being set apart in this way. Harsh disciplinary policies essentially create a class of juveniles who become significantly more likely to be arrested as adults. The pipeline has disproportionately affected African American youth, who have seen an increase in punitive action by schools and juvenile incarceration even as those things have declined for whites of the same cohort.

The study of narrative scripts of offenders—the offenders' own narratives of their lives and offenses—has illuminated other factors that influence desistance. Most notably, such narratives tend to fall into one of two types, which researchers label condemnation and redemption. Offenders who offer condemnation narratives emphasize the factors beyond their control: their lack of education or opportunities, the role of bad luck, the other people in their lives whose actions contributed to the offender's crime or getting caught. Redemption narratives, on the other hand, place responsibility on the offender, and emphasize the attempt to move away from the past, and sometimes to make up for past wrongdoing (not simply by serving time in prison, but through such means as volunteer work) or, in the parlance of Alcoholics Anonymous, making amends. Offenders who volunteer redemption narratives have a greater rate of desistance. This too reinforces the importance of desistance support for offenders rather than focusing only on the punitive.

Terms & Concepts

Ban the Box: An international civil rights campaign seeking to ban employers from asking job applicants if they have a criminal record.

Desistance: Desistance means cessation or stopping, and is typically used in social sciences contexts to refer to the cessation of harmful, unwanted behaviors, such as criminal activity, alcohol abuse, or drug abuse.

Drug Court: Drug courts are judicial authorities with special alternative sentencing authority for specific drug-related crimes, in order to avoid sending nonviolent drug offenders to prison when addiction treatments are available as an alternative.

Offender: "Offender" is a less loaded term than "criminal," "ex-felon," "ex-convict," and other terms that are often used to label a person rather than describe their actions.

Recidivism: Recidivism is the repetition or recurrence of negative behavior, usually specifically law-breaking behavior or the abuse of drugs or alcohol; the opposite of desistance.

School-to-Prison: The school-to-prison pipeline or school-to-prison connection is a metaphor used to describe systemic problems in the United States that contribute to a pattern of juvenile offenders becoming adult offenders, and especially the role of educational institutions and zero-tolerance policies in creating or exacerbating those problems.

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Cochran, J. C., & Mears, D. P. (2017). The path of least desistance: Inmate compliance and recidivism. JQ: Justice Quarterly, 34(3), 431–458. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=121307253&site=ehost-live

D'Alessio, S., Stolzenberg, L., & Flexon, J. (2015). The effect of Hawaii's ban the box law on repeat offending. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 40(2), 336–352. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=102426631&site=ehost-live

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Halsey, M., Armstrong, R., & Wright, S. (2017). 'F*ck it!': Matza and the mood of fatalism in the desistance process. British Journal of Criminology, 57(5), 1041–1060. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=124488995&site=ehost-live

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Van Roeyen, S., Anderson, S., Vanderplasschen, W., Colman, C., & Laenen, F. V. (2017). Desistance in drug-using offenders: A narrative review. European Journal of Criminology, 14(5), 606–625. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=125299980&site=ehost-live

Visher, C. A. (2017, August). Social networks and desistance. Criminology & Public Policy. 749–752. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=124834653&site=ehost-live

Ziegler, J. A., Kuhl, D. C., Swisher, R. R., & Chavez, J. M. (2017). Parenthood residency status and criminal desistance across neighborhood contexts. Deviant Behavior, 38(1), 17–33. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=119877827&site=ehost-live

Suggested Reading

Goshin, L. S. (2015). The ex-prisoner's dilemma: How women negotiate competing narratives of reentry and desistance. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 7(4), 525–529. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=111336267&site=ehost-live

Loughran, T. A., Nagin, D. S., & Nguyen, H. (2017). Crime and legal work: A Markovian model of the desistance process. Social Problems, 64(1), 30–52. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=120801055&site=ehost-live

Stansfield, R., Mowen, T. J., & O'Connor, T. (2018). Religious and spiritual support, reentry, and risk. JQ: Justice Quarterly, 35(2), 254-279. Retrieved January 1, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=127557548&site=ehost-live

Ten Bensel, T., & Harris, D. (2017). Introduction for special issue on desistance from sexual offending. Criminal Justice Studies, 30(2), 97–100. Retrieved September 29, 2017, from EBSCO Sociology Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sxi&AN=122428591&site=ehost-live