Do the reasons why people desist from crime vary by age, length of offending career or lifestyle factors?
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Author | Stephen Farrall,Joanna Shapland |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/hojo.12494 |
Received: 14 December 2021 Accepted: 25 April 2022
DOI: 10.1111/ho jo.12494
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Do the reasons why people desist from crime
vary by age, length of offending career or
lifestyle factors?
Stephen Farrall1Joanna Shapland2
1Stephen Farrall is Professor of
Criminology, School of Sociology and
Social Policy, University of Nottingham
2Joanna Shapland is Edward Bramley
Chair in Criminal Justice, School of Law,
University of Sheffield
Correspondence
Stephen Farrall,Professor of Criminology,
School of Sociology and Social Policy,
University of Nottingham.
Email: stephen.farrall@nottingham.ac.uk
Abstract
Research into desistance from crime has progressed
enormously in the past three decades. Despite this
tremendous growth, some issues remain unexplored.
Among these is the extent to which the reasons why peo-
ple stop offending might vary by the age at which they
stop, and their previous lifestyles. Herein we explore the
extent to which the reasons why people desist are asso-
ciated with their age, and the length and nature of their
criminal career.We find that there are no particular asso-
ciations between the reasons for their desistance and any
of these variables, though social context is important. So
particular social contexts are seen by those desisting as
key to their wish to desist, but they may occur at differ-
ent ages and it is when they are salient to that individual
that they promote action. We close by discussing why
this might be the case and the ramifications for theories
of desistance.
KEYWORDS
age, criminal careers, desistance, longitudinal research
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and
reproduction in any medium, providedthe original work is properly cited.
© 2022 The Authors. The HowardJournal of Crime and Justice published by Howard League and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Howard J. Crim. Justice. 2022;61:519–539. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hojo 519
520 THE HOWARDJOURNAL OF CRIME AND JUSTICE
1 INTRODUCTION
In the years since the early- to mid-1990s, when research into desistance from crime exploded into
a legitimate topic of research, we havedeveloped a tremendous amount of insight into why people
stop offending. Substantively, we know manyof the reasons why people desist; engagement with
their social context such as families and employment, as well as institutions such as armed ser-
vices and universities have been found to be associated with desistance (Graham & Bowling, 1995;
Sampson & Laub, 1993). Similarly, we have charted the emotional states which desisters often go
though (Farrall et al., 2014) and explored the ways in which they go about changing either their
identities, or the narratives which they tell themselves and others about their pasts (Maruna,
2001). Explorations which initially focused on males (e.g., Shover, 1985) have been broad-
ened to encompass female desisters (Gålnander, 2020; Giordano, Cernkovich & Rudolph, 2002;
Österman, 2018), and some have charted processes of desistance for various ethnicities (Calverly,
2013). More recently, the desistance of particular types of offenders has been explored, most
notably sex offenders (Thompson & Thomas with Karstedt, 2019) but also white-collar offend-
ers (Hunter, 2015) and car thieves (Light, Nee & Ingham, 1993).We know of studies of desistance
in England, Scotland (McCulloch, 2005), Brazil (Bugnon, 2020), Australia (Halsey, Armstrong &
Wright, 2016), France (Fernando, 2021;Kazemian,2019), Sweden (Gålnander, 2020; Österman,
2018), the USA (Giordano, 2016; Mulvey & Schubert, 2016; Sampson & Laub, 1993), Canada (F.-
Dufour & Brassard, 2014), Chile (Villagra, 2019), Spain (Cid & Marti, 2012), Ireland (Healy, 2010),
Germany (Bereswill, 2010), and Israel (Segev, 2020).
Alongside this, numerous theories have been proposed to explain why some people desist and
others do not. Many of these develop ideas from earlier thinking on the causes of delinquency.
Sampson & Laub’s (1993) theory of age-graded informal social control, for example, drawsheavily
on Hirschi’s (1969) work on social control, while others have incorporated insights from psy-
choanalysis (Gadd, 2006), existentialism (Farrall, 2005), and rational choice theories (Shover &
Thompson, 1992). Both social context and the individual’s own agency seem to be important
(Bottoms & Shapland, 2011; Farrall,Bottoms & Shapland, 2010). As part of this work, developmen-
tal criminologists have explored the role and timing of turning points in processes of desistance
(Ouimet&LeBlanc,1996), the age-maturation relationship (Glueck & Glueck, 1950), the medi-
ating impact of age on the employment-desistance relationship (Uggen, 2000) and the timing of
parenthood in processes of desistance (Na, 2016).
However, a key element which still remains to be explored is the extent to which individuals
desist for the same or different reasons according to their age, length of criminal career or the
nature of their previous offending career. This issue is analogous to age-period-cohort studies
(Grasso, 2016), whereby the analyses seek to disentangle the roleof ag e, birth cohort and temporal
effects. In the case of variations in accounts of desistance by age, the data needed require that
respondents of different age groups are interviewed at the same time. This enables the analyst
to assess the extent to which younger people may desist for a different set of reasons than older
people desisting at the same time, yet in the same social context prevalent at that time. However,
many quantitative samples of criminal careersare based on cohorts of people from the same school
year,meaning that while variations in age are available for longitudinal analyses, it is impossible to
assess if variations in reasons for desistance exist for different age groups. Some studies (Burnett,
1992; F.-Dufour & Brassard, 2014) have suggested that there may be different styles of desistance
and routes away from crime. However, these are small-scale studies (e.g., F.-Dufour & Brassard
had a sample of 29 with no follow up). As such, the extent to which desistance varies by age, length
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