Beyond personal reform: Adolescent drug-law offenders and the desistance process
| Author | Thomas Anton Sandøy |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474518809021 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Beyond personal reform:
Adolescent drug-law
offenders and the
desistance process
Thomas Anton Sandøy
Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH), Norway
Abstract
While much research on desistance addresses processes of change for repeat offenders
during and after imprisonment, this article applies insights from desistance studies to
novice offenders outside the traditional justice system. In Norway, increasing numbers
of adolescent drug-law offenders have been diverted to alternative justice systems over
the last decade. Based on in-depth interviews with youth enrolled in programmes to
help them refrain from drug use, the article seeks to identify how the early-stage
desistance process is understood by would-be desisters. Rather than ascribing
the rehabilitative programmes’ direct impact on their behaviour and thinking, the
adolescents emphasised the importance of restoring relationships with parents and
overcoming legal barriers. Accordingly, the analysis shows how concerns with personal
reform were outweighed by (i) social and (ii) legal concerns. While the precedence of
external concerns over personal reform may reflect the participants’ age and level of
criminal involvement, it also reflects a particular culture of intervention.
Keywords
alternative penal sanctions, desistance, drugs, juvenile justice, penal welfarism,
rehabilitation
Corresponding author:
Thomas Anton Sandøy, Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Drugs, Norwegian Institute of Public Health
(NIPH), Post Box 222 Skøyen, 0213 Oslo, Norway.
Email: thomas.sandoy@fhi.no
Punishment & Society
2019, Vol. 21(5) 578–595
!The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474518809021
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Introduction
Over the last decade, Norway has seen an upturn in the use of alternative penal
sanctions in cases involving young offenders, reflecting the ongoing search for
adequate rehabilitative measures in juvenile justice (Lid, 2016). The rehabilitative
turn, which has had a particular impact on the sanctioning of young, low-level
drug-law offenders, is well in line with the ‘welfare ambitiousness’ characteristic of
countries with highly developed welfare models (Rugk ˚asa, 2011). Welfare-
ambitious states, such as the Nordic, have been characterised as service-
intensive, implying the existence of an expansive safety net that attends to citizens
from all walks of life, including those on criminal trajectories. In the criminal
justice field, the term ‘Big Mother penal welfarism’ has recently been coined to
describe this benign but intrusive interventionist approach (Smith and Ugelvik,
2017). This article deals with emerging interventionist approaches to young drug-
law offenders in Norway, and the concerns raised by the youth in the wake of these
interventions. Specifically, it explores how the targeted youth framed processes
of change.
The participants in this study were enrolled in desistance-oriented programmes
due to drug-related crime. When entering these programmes, the youth simulta-
neously entered into internal and external conversations about change, which lies
at the heart of the desistance paradigm (McNeill, 2006). Hence, the analysis has
been placed in a desistance research framework. Acknowledging the critical
remarks of Laub and Sampson (2001: 10), who recommend confining studies of
desistance to ‘those who reach some reasonable threshold of frequent and serious
offending’, the choice of regarding young, and for the most part, low-level,
offenders as would-be desisters, may appear strange. However, the concept con-
tains several elements applicable to studying such a sample. Subjective concerns
about change, raised by penalised youth before the consolidation of ‘criminal
careers’, are indeed ‘desistance-related matters’ (Farrall and Maruna, 2004), as
they serve as a backdrop to tentative adaptations of criminal behaviours.
Naturally, the aim of such an approach is not to establish desistance in young
offenders, as aspirations to change are no guarantee of desistance, but to explore
how individuals envision changes in criminal behaviours at an early stage and to
identify where these changes are rooted (King, 2013).
The usefulness of the desistance concept for studying the change processes of
young drug-law offenders is particularly tangible when insights from the desistance
paradigm are juxtaposed with rehabilitation research (McNeill, 2004, 2006, 2012).
If the solution (an intervention) is the starting point of theory building, as is often
the case with rehabilitation research, the intervention itself will often be placed
at the centre of the change process. Desistance studies, on the other hand, ‘stress
that the process of change exists before, behind and beyond the intervention’
(McNeill, 2012: 13). It is this move away from a narrow emphasis on interventions
to questions of how and why rehabilitation works (Maruna, 2000), that makes
desistance-based perspectives particularly fitting for analysing the accounts of the
Sandøy 579
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