Identity and desistance from crime

Abstract

There is a contentious debate within criminology about the causes of desistance from crime. Some theories, such as Sampson and Laub's age-graded informal social control theory assert that desistance is due to the influences of structural factors such as placement in good jobs or finding good marriage partners. In large measure, those who find these kinds of conventional turning points are simply the victims of good luck since many desist by default. Other theories of desistance, such as Giordano et al.'s (American Journal of Sociology 107:990-164, 2002) and Maruna's (Making good: how ex-convicts reform and build their lives, American Psychological Association Books, 2001) appeal to the role of cognitive processes in quitting crime and the importance of human agency in the deliberate decision of former offenders to stop. Among this latter type of theory is Paternoster and Bushway's (2009) rational choice-based identity theory of desistance. This theory asserts that most offenders reach a point where the utility of offending is perceived to be offset by the costs, both immediate and those projected into the future. Part of this process is that the offender begins to think that his current, working identity of a criminal offender is no longer desired and begins to think of a future self that is free from crime. This future self consists of both a feared self that the offender does not want to become and a possible self that they now aspire to and are motivated to become. In the Paternoster-Bushway identity theory, then, desistance from crime is anchored in intentional self-change. This chapter describes the identity theory of desistance and how it differs from both structural and other cognitive theories of criminal desistance. It also makes an argument as to why identity and cognitive changes within the current criminal offender must precede the arrival of structural supports for change, like marriages and jobs. The dominant theory of criminal desistance in criminology today is Sampson and Laub's age-graded theory of informal social control. In their theory, desistance comes about primarily as a result of an increase in informal social control as ex-offenders find themselves in conventional roles like marriages and jobs. Crime is reduced because ex-offenders do not want to lose their marriages or their jobs so they do what their spouses (stay home) and employers (come to work on time and work hard) tell them to do. In addition to altering incentives, these agents of social control also reduce opportunities for crime by these individuals. In their theory, ex-offenders do not change in some fundamental way such that they now have a lower propensity to commit crime. Rather, the reduced crime is the direct result of the actions of the agents of informal social control, rather than any initiative on the part of the individual, at least initially. We have argued elsewhere (Paternoster and Bushway 2009, 2011; Bushway and Paternoster 2011), that their theory is structurally deterministic, allowing for little in the way of offenders' intentional self-change (agency) because it minimizes the importance of prior changes in offender's identities or what Giordano et al. (2002) have called cognitive transformations as a prelude to desistance. In this chapter we recap an identity theory of desistance that builds upon and compliments the work of scholars like Giordano et al. (2002), Maruna (2001), Farrall (2005), and Shover (1983, 1996). Because the theory has been presented in more detail in other publications (Paternoster and Bushway 2009, 2011; Bushway and Paternoster 2011) we only briefly review the theory before moving on to highlight at what points our theory differs from others, why we believe that identity changes must come before entrance into conventional institutions such as marriages and jobs, and finally on to what research to date has to say about the important of identity change in the desistance process.