Desistance, Social Justice and Lived Experience

Abstract

A central aim of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) is to (re-) centre criminalized and marginalized people’s voices as essential to our understanding of punishment, law, and justice, as well as on-thegroundwork by people toward change and reform. JPP positions actors in justice as experts and highlights their identities as much more than their legal status of ‘off ender’. The journal seeks to situate the essence of incarceration and reentry (as well as of being criminalized and striving to remove the label of ‘criminal’) within lived experiences. In this Special Issue, we engage with an area of criminological research that has sought to endorse precisely these principles almost from its origins: desistance from crime.