Getting out of the life: Crime desistance by female street offenders

Although increased attention is being paid to gender variations in the nature and extent of crime, little has been done to describe the termination of criminal careers by female offenders. This paper describes how 30 women with long histories of criminal involvement changed their perspectives toward life and criminal behavior. Changes in criminal behavior occurred as a result of a three‐stage process: building resolve or discovering motivation to stop (i.e., socially disjunctive experiences), making and publicly disclosing the decision to stop, and maintaining new behaviors and integration into new social networks. Desistance appears to be a process as complex and lengthy as the processes of initial involvement. Overall, the social processes and turning points described by the women in the present research are quite similar to those reported by men in previous studies.