Desistance
Definition
The process by which an individual stops offending, usually gradual rather than a single event, and typically tied to changes in routine, relationships and identity.
Related terms
- Adolescence-Limited Offending
- In Moffitt's taxonomy, antisocial behaviour that emerges in the teenage years, driven by peer context and the gap between physical and social...
- Age-Crime Curve
- The graph of offending rate against age, which rises through adolescence, peaks in the late teens and declines through adulthood in almost...
- Aging Out
- The empirical tendency of most offenders to stop committing crime as they move through their twenties, largely independent of formal punishment.
- Base Rate
- The prior probability of an event or proposition before specific evidence is considered. In forensic inference, the base rate is the probability...
- Habitual Offender Legislation
- Statutes that impose registration, restriction or an enhanced sentence on a person with a defined number of prior qualifying convictions, including three-strikes...
- Life-Course-Persistent Offending
- In Moffitt's taxonomy, antisocial behaviour that begins in early childhood, rooted in neuropsychological deficits and disrupted parenting, and that tends to continue...
- Maturation Reform
- An older criminological label for the same aging-out pattern, used before modern life-course research identified the social mechanisms, such as work and...
- Recidivism
- The tendency of a person who has been convicted of a crime to reoffend. Measured differently across jurisdictions: by reconviction, by reincarceration,...
- Reconviction
- A recidivism measure counting only new offences that result in a court finding of guilt, narrower than rearrest and wider than reimprisonment.
- Communitarianism
- A society's density of interlocking obligations and mutual concern, which Braithwaite argues determines whether shame is available as an effective informal control...
- Comparison Group
- A matched group that did not receive a programme or sentence, used to isolate that programme's effect on reoffending from other causes...
- Encounters with Goodness
- Ronel and Elisha's term for moments, relationships, or experiences of unearned kindness and moral regard that a person carries forward as a...
Explained in these topics
- The Age-Crime Curve and Patterns of Youth Offending
- Age-Crime Curve and Youth Offending (Unit IX)The gradual process by which an individual stops offending, tied to changes in routine, relationships and identity rather than a single event.
- Recidivism and Habitual OffendingThe process of stopping offending and staying stopped, studied as the mirror concept to recidivism rather than as a single event.
- Recidivism and Habitual Offending (UGC-NET Unit VIII)The process of stopping offending and staying stopped, studied as the mirror concept to recidivism rather than as a single event.
- Reintegrative Shaming Theory and Positive CriminologyThe process by which a person who has offended stops offending and sustains a crime-free life over time.