Desistance

Desistance. This is a word that consumes much of my thinking. It's a fancy word for stopping or quitting, and when referenced in criminology it refers to the process of stopping or quitting criminal behavior. Various frameworks within criminology, including lifecourse criminology, developmental criminology, and the criminal career paradigm, attempt to provide explanations for desistance.

So what factors lead to desistance among active criminal offenders? Typical answers that have been expounded upon in the desistance literature to date include factors such as a quality marriage, employment, military service, or a cognitive transformation. I read two recent articles that explore interesting new factors that may be related to desistance. These two articles currently have me excited.

The first article was published this year in Social Science Research and is entitled "Desistance from Delinquency: The Marriage Effect Revisited and Extended". This piece by Kevin Beaver et. al. explores whether there is a genetic component to desistance. Sounds like a crazy idea at first glance doesn't it? Kevin Beaver and colleagues have been championing biosocial explanations for criminal behavior (and now quitting criminal behavior), and they generally find that the interaction between biological and sociological factors are the strongest predictors. So each has a small impact in and of itself, but the interaction between the two often demonstrates a larger impact. In this particular article they confirm previous findings that marriage in and of itself does significantly influence desistance. But they also find that some genetic polymorphisms also predict desistance and that the interaction between marriage and these genetic polymorphisms also predicted desistance. Thanks to Beaver and colleagues biology is back in criminology, and I think this is a good thing!

The second article I recently read on desistance was in my new issue of Criminology that came in the mail a couple of days ago. This piece is by Scott Jacques and Richard Wright and is entitled "The Victimization-Termination Link". What they basically find here is that some offenders desist from criminal behavior when they eventually become a victim themselves. This victimization in a sense causes them to rethink their criminal lifestyle. This is very interesting to me. We've know for some time that offenders are more likely to also be victims, primarily because of their lifestyles or routine activities (see Hindelang, Gottfredson, and Garofalo, 1978). It's interesting though to think of this victimization risk in a longitudinal perspective, as a factor potentially leading to desistance.

Of course neither of these findings lend themselves to any real policy implications. I'm no medical scientist but I don't believe we can change people's genetic makeup. I don't think we want to implement a policy that makes offenders become victimized either. But from a risk factor/prediction approach, these two factors might at least improve our understanding of criminal desistance. I don't think we should just limit our independent variables to dynamic factors that we can change or manipulate (neither do I think that there is any serious movement to suggest this, since age has always been on the table as an important predictor of offending). I'll end with one last thought. It occurs to me that particularly harsh, deterrence-based punishment in a sense might generate a victimization effect among offenders. What implications does the piece on the victimization-termination link have for the deterrence literature?

Happy Thanksgiving!