During the last few decades, criminologists have identified several adult roles and statuses, including employment, positive family relations, and economic stability, as critical for promoting successful reintegration and desistance. Very few researchers, however, have investigated the conditions that serve to bring about these transitions and successes crucial for behavior change. As a complement to a burgeoning amount of literature on the impact of incarceration on health, we emphasize the reverse: Health has important implications for reentry outcomes and reincarceration. Informed by multiple disciplines, we advance a health‐based model of desistance in which both mental and physical dimensions of health affect life chances in the employment and family realms and ultimately recidivism. Investigating this issue with longitudinal data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative (SVORI) and structural equation models, we find overall support for the health‐based model of desistance. Our results indicate several significant pathways through which both manifestations of health influence employment, family conflict, financial problems, and crime and reincarceration. The findings highlight the need for implementation of correctional and transitional policies to improve health among the incarcerated and avert health‐related reentry failures.

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Objective: Research on the relationship between religion and criminal recidivism has produced encouraging but ultimately inconclusive findings. This study offers a new direction for studying the role of religious support in reentry, providing a longitudinal analysis of the effect of change in religious support on both crime and noncrime outcomes postrelease. Methods: Employing mixed-effects longitudinal analyses, this study uses data from the Serious and Violent Offender Reentry Initiative to examine the impact of religious support on postrelease substance use, criminal recidivism, and employment. Results: Religious support had strong and robust prosocial effects on both postrelease employment and substance use. The relationship between religious support and recidivism, however, did not reach statistical significance when we added social support to the research model. Conclusion: Religious support and meaning making seems to help people address their criminogenic needs and also seems to be an important responsivity factor that is often overlooked in criminological theory and practice. Religious support must therefore be recognized as an important theoretical and practical variable in current efforts to develop successful reentry pathways.

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In this article, the effect of recent immigration on homicide rates across city of Austin, Texas census tracts is examined. Since 1980, Austin's recent immigrant population increased by more than 580% across the metropolitan area and it is now considered a “pre-emerging” immigrant gateway city to the United States. Therefore the changing population dynamics in Austin provide an excellent opportunity to study the effect of recent immigration on homicide. After controlling for structural predictors of homicide and correcting for spatial autocorrelation, our findings indicate that recent immigration is not associated with homicide.

Nonfatal strangulation between intimate partners represents an extreme controlling form of violent behavior, increasing the risk that intimate partner violence (IPV) becomes lethal. Guided by Dutton and Goodman's conceptualization of coercive control, the present research explored the relation between death threats and subsequent nonfatal strangulation to amplify the credibility of those threats, using a large sample of IPV perpetrators ( n = 6,488). Logistic regression analyses determined the relation between overt threats to a partner's life during an initial incident arrest and subsequent nonfatal strangulation postincident arrest, accounting for perpetrator characteristics and assessed risk. Results showed the highly gendered nature of this violent behavior, noting that men were significantly more likely than women to persist in nonfatal strangulation. Given the potential lethality of this violent behavior, the analysis also explored whether treatment service recommendations (family violence education, counseling, and mental health evaluation) mitigate these patterns. These preliminary findings support the further exploration of treatment and intervention efforts for reducing nonfatal strangulation.