"But What Does It Mean? Defining, Measuring, and Analyzing Desistance From Crime in Criminal Justice"

The title of this post is the title of this new NIJ-published chapter authored by Michael Rocque.  Here is part of its executive summary: 

Research on crime over the course of an individual’s life has increased in the last 30 years both in scope and specificity.  One focus area that has emerged from this work is what scholars call “desistance from crime.”  Generally, desistance is understood to mean the reduction in criminal behavior that occurs after a person reaches adulthood.

But exactly what desistance is remains unclear, as varying definitions and measurement strategies have evolved over time. Early scholarship tended to view desistance as an event — that is, the termination of offending or end of a criminal career.  More recent definitions suggest that desistance is instead a process by which criminality declines over time.  Because inconsistent definitions lead to varying measurement strategies, it is difficult to come to conclusions about desistance.

The overall goal of this white paper is to provide grounded recommendations for policy and practice.  To do that, the paper reviews definitions of desistance used in the literature and then offers an updated, theoretically grounded definition as a foundation for future work: Desistance is “the process by which criminality, or the individual risk for antisocial conduct, declines over the life-course, generally after adolescence.”

The paper discusses how researchers have measured and modeled desistance and explores the implications of these strategies.  Which ways of measuring desistance get closest to the phenomenon of interest?  Which are most likely to advance our understanding of why people exit a criminal life and how we can facilitate that process?  These guiding questions provide a framework for the paper.

Finally, this white paper provides an overview of unresolved issues — such as the choice between surveys and official records, quantitative and qualitative methods, types of samples, and various modeling techniques — and offers detailed recommendations for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars who are seeking to examine and promote desistance from crime.