Desistance and the “aging out” phenomenon

One of the most fascinating topics in crime is the “aging out” phenomenon. The number of offenders recorded across gender and race spikes in the early twenties, before sharply declining. (The example from UK data shown here is taken from a Cambridge article on the subject ) The number of offenses also decreases sharply, meaning that this curve cannot be explained only by a spike in one-time adolescent offenders; repeat offenders, responsible for the majority of criminal activity, also appear to begin desisting from crime at that time.

What during those early years is most responsible for turning individuals away from crime? There are many possible reasons, including:

1) Guilt. Remorse for the harm caused to others is a powerful motivator for change.
2) Lifestyle incentives. Career success and relationships are incompatible with criminal activity, which may create incentives for young adults to change their ways.
3) Perception of risk. Offenders may become more aware of the risk of personal injury, or physical aging may present limitations to the commission of crimes.
4) Increased skill. Over time, criminals may learn to avoid detection and capture, reducing recorded crime.
5) Incarceration. Offenders cannot commit crimes if they have been removed from society, and this may deter them from future offenses.

Item 4, if a significant factor, would imply that the age curve is inaccurate since it would not reflect a real desistance trend. However crime we cannot detect by definition cannot be factored into a measure of desistance, so this possibility is currently a dead-end.

Item 5 also has limited value for explaining desistance. 2009 prison inmate statistics reveal that 209,100 inmates were ages 20-24, dwarfing the 23,800 reported for ages 18-19. Assuming that these 20-24 year olds were not incarcerated for a first offense, this would help to account for a reduction in recorded crime from ages 18-24. Yet incapacitation is not “desistance”, and for some categories of crime imprisonment appears to have little if any deterrent effect. According to one BJS study, robbers, burglars, larcenists and motor vehicle thieves were the highest re-offenders at 70-75%. Overall, 67.5% of prisoners were rearrested within 3 years. While incarceration reduces crime for its duration, it cannot explain reduction over the life-course.

A valuable distinction that is frequently overlooked in literature is criminal activity and criminal psychology. Desistance is defined as the cessation of criminal activity, yet this can only be measured by reported crime. How, then, would you distinguish between a reformed criminal and a criminal biding his time? Neither are maintaining a criminal record, and both may be attending required therapy, reporting to work, and following their parole; yet one intends to re-offend. The most important indicators of criminal reform are psychological, not behavioral. For this reason I focus on the attitudes and thinking of offenders, and consider items 1-3 to be the best contenders for explaining desistance, and therefore the best areas for research.

"Making Good"

I am currently reading a fascinating book called Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives, by Shadd Maruna. The book focuses on one element referred to as the “self-narrative”, defined as how individuals make sense of their lives. According to Maruna, “sustained desistance most likely requires a fundamental and intentional shift in a person’s sense of self.” His research set out to compare the self-narratives of those who persist in committing crimes, and those who have desisted from crime.

Some aspects of the author’s approach I find mistaken. For example, he does not attempt to understand or acknowledge that crime is the result of criminal thinking. In fact he shows open disdain at attempts to differentiate the psychology of criminals from the psychology of the law abiding, calling such views a belief in the “bogeyman” or “mark of Cain”. He argues that the “bogeyman” is a fascination of Americans, who prefer to think of criminals as irredeemably evil. They draw comfort from the fact that they have nothing in common with such monsters. Maruna, on the other hand, treats criminal activity as merely one form of addiction, a condition from which one can recover with work.

This emotional response to the study of criminal thinking seems to be based on a soft determinism. He describes reformed offenders as having an “exaggerated sense of control over the future and an inflated, almost missionary, sense of purpose in life.” Maruna refers to this as the “process of willful, cognitive distortion” or “making good”. The process is a distortion because the offender is rejecting the notion that he is doomed or fated to his situation, a fate Maruna himself calls “rational realism.” Persisting offenders

felt they had little chance of achieving success in the "straight" world’…[and] from what we know about the causes of criminal behavior, they might just be right.

Certainly if criminals are fated to be so because of their social circumstances, it is unfair to stigmatize them. Yet if the offender can change after shifting his “sense of self”, is this not proof that he is not fated and that the core of his condition is his thinking and not his environment? In fact while he presents a world that an ex offender cannot succeed in as “rational realism”, Maruna admits this view “probably does the individual a disservice”. If you can only succeed in life by rejecting your view of reality, you might want to rethink that view.

It is interesting, then, that an author with this outlook could offer such a promising idea as the “self-narrative”. And I agree with him that understanding how ex-convicts maintain their efforts to desist from crime would help greatly in rehabilitative efforts. It would also help to identify early the signs that a juvenile is headed down that path. I will write a follow-up post to review the results of his research.