Walking Into the Sunset: How Criminal Achivement Shapes the Desistance Process: Criminal Achievement and the Desistance Process

According to the criminal career paradigm, the link between past and future criminal activities is important and the desistance process may vary for individuals whose criminal trajectories were punctuated by failure compared with those who achieved a certain level of success. This study, based on the life narratives of 27 individuals who maintained a state of nonoffending for more than a year, examines how criminal achievement modulates the desistance process. The aim is to understand whether criminal achievement acts as a barrier or a facilitator in the desistance process. A short questionnaire based on the life-history calendar method was used to classify individuals according to the parameters of their criminal careers. Narrative life stories were then used to look at the obstacles and frustrations encountered during desistance. The results show the relation between criminal achievement and desistance is complex: success in criminal activities is not always hindering desistance.

Who is Transitioning out of Prison? Characterising Female Offenders and Their Needs in Chile

The last decades’ increase in female incarceration has translated into an increasing number of women being released from prison. Understanding their characteristics and criminal trajectories can enlighten us regarding the different needs of women upon re-entering society after incarceration. Drawing on data from the Reinserción, Desistimiento y Reincidencia en Mujeres Privadas de Libertad en Chile study, this article identifies different profiles among a cohort of 225 women who were released from prison in Santiago, Chile, and demonstrates that significant heterogeneity exists among them in terms of their criminal trajectories and the intervention needs to support their transition out of prison.

Introduction

This chapter develops the thesis that a developmental perspective is essential to advancing knowledge about criminal trajectories and to gaining a deeper, more nuanced understanding of criminal behavior across the life span. In discussing criminal trajectories, an emphasis is placed on the importance of longitudinal data, person-oriented analyses, developmental processes, a life-span approach, and dynamic transactions between the individual and the environment. Last, the chapter details three premises on which the book is based (a) crime is a product of developmental processes, (b) criminals compose a heterogeneous population, and (c) process models are essential to understand criminal behavior in a developmental context.

Findings on the Number and Shape of Criminal Trajectories

This chapter presents findings from select studies from the criminal trajectory literature to highlight the heterogeneity among offender populations and subpopulations, specifically female offenders and sex offenders. The chapter contributes a state-of-the-art overview of what is known about criminal trajectories and what this work tells us about the nature and pattern of offending over time within and across individuals. It describes and synthesizes the results of research in terms of the number of trajectory groups derived, their shape, peak, length, size, and crime mix and offers insights into the reasons for the variability across studies along these dimensions. In order to present the broad range of topics to which trajectory research has been applied in the criminal justice field, results are also presented on four novel areas: (a) patterns of risk assessment scores over time scores, (b) code-of-the-street beliefs, (c) cross-national terrorism, and (d) monetary costs of crime across trajectory groups.

Criminal Trajectories

This book is a nontechnical, accessible, scholarly volume about criminal trajectories within a developmental context. The book provides a comprehensive overview of criminal trajectories as a concept and methodology. It addresses the complexities, controversies, findings, and applications from the rich criminal trajectory literature. It synthesizes material from the current literature in a range of fields, including developmental psychology, developmental and life-course criminology, quantitative methods, and crime prevention, to illustrate the theoretical, empirical, and practical utility of considering the heterogeneity underlying offender populations (i.e., of criminal trajectories) in the conceptualization, response to, and prevention of crime. Each chapter ends with suggested supplemental readings.

Family Instability in Childhood and Criminal Offending During the Transition Into Adulthood

The structure and stability of families have long stood as key predictors of juvenile delinquency. Boys from “broken homes” experience a higher prevalence of juvenile delinquency than those from intact families. Unresolved is whether the consequences of frequently disrupted family contexts endure to shape criminal trajectories into adulthood. Long-term influence may also be indirect. Life-course criminologists credit family formation during the transition to adulthood, and particularly marriage, for redirecting men’s criminal trajectories, but children who experience repeated changes in family structure are more likely to experience precarious starts to their own eventual family formation. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its two child-centered supplemental studies ( N = 1,127), we find that the experience of repeated family structure change is associated with higher rates of arrest and incarceration during early adulthood for White men but not for Black men. However, divergent patterns of own family formation among men in early adulthood do not mediate this association.