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Book review: Moving on from Crime and Substance Use: Transforming Identities

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 June 2017
AuthorSarah Anderson
DOI10.1177/0264550517705778b
Date01 June 2017
Subject MatterBook reviews
PRB705778 161..166
Book reviews
165
Moving on from Crime and Substance Use: Transforming
Identities
Anne Robinson and Paula Hamilton (eds)
Policy Press; 2016; pp. 272; £25.99; pbk
ISBN: 978-1447324683
Reviewed by: Sarah Anderson, University of Glasgow
The co-occurrence of substance use and offending is well-known to practitioners in
the field; nevertheless, the relationship between the two is not straightforward, nor is
the relationship between moves away from crime and from substance use (or rather,
addiction). Practitioner and researcher experience suggests that for some people
these processes – desistance from offending and recovery from substance use – are
related. So the significant disconnect to date between desistance and recovery
research is surprising, with research in both areas guilty of conflating or poorly
elucidating the (relationship between the) two processes of change.
This edited collection attempts to draw these two areas of research closer
together, concentrating on one factor that has emerged in research on both change
processes: transformations in identity, both personal and social. The chapters
explore diverse aspects of identity that may have particular salience for these
change processes. The collection includes empirical research, while other topics are
addressed theoretically, drawing on existing literature.
In Chapter 1, Hamilton gives a helpful, and often bypassed, introduction to
identity and its meanings. In Chapter 2, Robinson explores the interplay of emotions
and identity and how repression, expression and regulation of emotions, such as
fear and shame, feed into both offending and desistance. This small-scale empirical
study contributes to the nascent field of criminological research on the role of
emotions in desistance. Robinson’s research also commences an important explo-
ration of the role of gender, which is developed further in later chapters.
Chapter 3 reports findings on aspirational masculinities from Sloan’s ethno-
graphic doctoral study of a male...

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