July 2020: Special Issue – Desistance from Crime
Volume 62, No. 3 | Go to abstracts
Articles
Page 1
We Know a Lot, but Not Nearly Enough: Introduction to the CJCCJ Special Issue on Desistance
Evan C. McCuish
Page 11
Desisting from Crime: In-Prison Behaviour and Cognition as Predictors of Post-Release Success
Glenn D. Walters
Page 29
Seductions of Exposure Time: The Mismeasurement of Desistance among Persons Involved in Frequent and Serious Offending
Evan C. McCuish
Page 51
Increasing Pretrial Releases and Reducing Felony Convictions for Defendants: Implications for Desistance from Crime
Travis C. Pratt, Teresa May, Lisa Kan
Page 71
Getting People with Serious Mental Illnesses on Track: Insights from the Health-Based Model of Desistance
Nathan W. Link, Jeffrey T. Ward, Bruce G. Link
Abstracts
We Know a Lot, but Not Nearly Enough: Introduction to the CJCCJ Special Issue on Desistance
Evan C. McCuish
Desistance is now one of the main criminal career parameters investigated by criminologists. Similarly, practitioners working within the criminal justice system are primarily focused on ways to promote desistance among their clients. However, these two groups typically think about desistance in different ways. Practitioners are often exposed to the idea from correctional psychology that desistance is the absence of recidivism. Criminologists typically consider desistance to be a process that includes recidivism. The purpose of this special issue was to present a criminological viewpoint of desistance. Authors of each article identified an area that they felt was a key or emerging theme in desistance research. This article introduces the topic of desistance, highlights how the articles in this special issue contributed to desistance research and have implications for criminal justice system practices, and ends with a call for future research on the measurement of human agency, structural and historical contexts that influence human agency, and whether human agency moderates the relationship between informal social control and desistance.
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Desisting from Crime: In-Prison Behaviour and Cognition as Predictors of Post-Release Success
Glenn D. Walters
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Seductions of Exposure Time: The Mismeasurement of Desistance among Persons Involved in Frequent and Serious Offending
Evan C. McCuish
Examining desistance has become an important part of the longitudinal examination of patterns of offending. Substantial attention has been given to defining desistance (e.g., as a process versus as an event), but less attention has been given to whether analytic strategies appropriately operationalize such definitions. The current study examines the prevalence of false desistance (i.e., wrongly concluding that a person has desisted) when semi-parametric group-based modelling is used. Data on 404 male and female participants followed from ages 12 to 35 as part of the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study were used to jointly model trajectories of convictions and trajectories of incarceration. The conviction model included incarceration as an exposure variable. Nevertheless, approximately 15% of desisters in this conviction model were characterized by false desistance. That is, their lack of continued convictions appeared to be due to involvement in serious crimes that resulted in lengthy periods of time incarcerated. This precluded opportunities to maintain their earlier levels of offending, even though their conviction trajectories were modelled taking incarceration into account. Joint trajectory modelling should be used to improve the detection of desistance and reliably evaluate the predictive validity of constructs hypothesized to influence desistance.
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Increasing Pretrial Releases and Reducing Felony Convictions for Defendants: Implications for Desistance from Crime
Travis C. Pratt, Teresa May, Lisa Kan
The bulk of the desistance literature has focused on social/contextual factors (marriage, employment, peers) and their criminogenic consequences. Less attention has been devoted to the role of criminal justice system involvement in the desistance process, and most of the existing research indicates that system involvement tends to inhibit or delay desistance from crime. One recent effort to combat that pattern was implemented with the Responsive Interventions for Change (RIC) Docket in Harris County, Texas, in 2016. The RIC Docket was intended to increase defendants’ access to a pretrial release bond and to reduce rates of felony convictions, thus lowering the risk of disrupting important prosocial ties and avoiding potentially stigmatizing labels. In the present study, we use case processing data on rates of pretrial release and felony convictions from one year prior to (N = 6,792) and three years following (N = 12,152) the implementation of the RIC Docket. Results show that those processed through the RIC Docket were 24% more likely to have access to pretrial release and 45% less likely to have their cases result in a conviction. We conclude by discussing the importance of policy changes intended to reduce barriers to the successful desistance process for individuals involved in the justice system.
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Getting People with Serious Mental Illnesses on Track: Insights from the Health-Based Model of Desistance
Nathan W. Link, Jeffrey T. Ward, Bruce G. Link
Scholarship from the life-course paradigm has produced much evidence on the crime-reducing benefits of turning points such as securing a good job or developing a stable, positive relationship. Building on these insights, recent work has demonstrated the utility of incorporating health into the study of desistance; for various reasons, both mental and physical health statuses have been shown to influence the likelihood of achieving these key life-course milestones. What is less well understood, however, is how mental and physical health may interact with each other and how this model applies to certain salient subgroups in criminal justice, such as those with serious mental illnesses. Importing the mental health–crime literature, we examine both the main and synergistic effects of mental and physical health on employment focus and relationship worry among a sample of persons with serious mental illness (N = 184). Findings from logistic and ordinary least squares regression models reveal that better physical health is associated with improved employment focus and that this effect is moderated by mental health status. In addition, better physical health is associated with a decrease in worry over one’s relationships. These findings point to the value of including physical and mental health states in life-course and desistance research, studies of persons with serious mental illnesses, and intervention and policy efforts to improve lives and promote desistance.