Processes of desistance from crime are intricate and, aside from concrete non-offending, they involve a change in self-perception and an acceptance and recognition of reform by others. A criminalized lifestyle often comes with significant stigma, which together with segregation or exclusion from conventional society can render the procurement of such acceptance and recognition difficult. This article is based on findings from repeated in-depth interviews with desisting women who are just setting out to approach mainstream society. Focusing on the women’s experiences of managing concealable stigma when (re)turning to conventional society, the analysis advances the understanding of individual reform with a focus on relational aspects of desistance from crime.
This article presents findings from a longitudinal interview study following the desistance processes of 10 women. While desistance theory primarily focuses on the processual movement away from crime, this article pays close attention to what desisters strive to desist into. The repeated in-depth interviews reveal a diverse range of future aspirations among desisters, and the analysis unravels gendered, class-, and age-graded aspects of such aspirations. As a result of these findings, the article problematizes parts of previous research both empirically and theoretically, and allows for a development of the understanding of desistance processes.
Purpose This article emphasizes the complexity of desistance processes by exploring how echoes of violent victimization from intimate partners work as a hindrance or barrier to desistance. Drawing on interviews with women who are striving to desist, this article seeks to elucidate how past experiences of excessive and recurring violent victimization affect the life course, with a focus on their restrictions on the women's desistance processes. Methods This paper is built upon repeated qualitative interviews with ten women in the early stages of their desistance processes. They were all interviewed repeatedly on a 6monthly basis for 2 years. Echoes of violent victimization as a hindrance to desistance emerged as a theme during the interviews and are explored further via a thematic analysis. Results Echoes of violent victimization from intimate partners restrict the women's social lives, complicating an already fragile (re)connection to conventional society. Additionally, many of the women are restricted by post-traumatic stress disorders directly related to their violent victimization, which impedes their agency and limits their abilities to act towards desistance. Conclusions Recurring violent victimization has severe implications for the women's desistance processes. Both social and health-related consequences of this violence restrict the women's ability to act towards desistance from crime and expose them to painful experiences of isolation, goal failure, and hopelessness. These conclusions are important contributions to the understanding of the complexity of desistance processes.
Although desistance is increasingly recognized as a series of complex processes by which individuals transform from offenders into nonoffenders, few desistance scholars have studied this process in depth. In recent years, however, some have begun to explore how desistance is a process rife with setbacks and struggles. Through an analysis of repeated in‐depth interviews with ten desisting women, in this study, we have found such struggles to be unsettling and outright frightening. Examples of this were prevalent throughout the women's narratives. The results of our analysis show how frightening aspects of desistance processes stem from making an unfamiliar, normative lifestyle familiar, while unfamiliarizing oneself with a familiar, deviant lifestyle. As such, desistance processes can be conceptualized as uncanny, that is, as pertaining to the frightening and uncertain. Although uncanniness is not a theoretical framework one tends to find in desistance research, it has the potential to develop the understanding of the struggles, fears, and anxieties of desistance processes. Through our analysis, we engage with how uncanniness can nuance established concepts in desistance research. Implications for theory as well as for criminal justice practice are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.