Desistance and dynamic risk factors belong together

ABSTRACT

Depending on definitions, dynamic risk factors and desistance are either highly intertwined or aligned with distinctly separate paradigms. This paper describes and critiques each concept, and then reviews research on how they may be linked, including some preliminary findings from a longitudinal study of the early phases of desistance in high-risk offenders. I argue that seeking to understand how reductions in dynamic risk work together with the development of the psychological components of desistance will shed the most light on how offenders move from persistence to the maintenance of desistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Desistance
• dynamic risk
• protective factors
• offender rehabilitation
• desistance mechanisms

Acknowledgements

The NZPP data set is the result of many hours of hard work from the original research team: Drs Rebecca Bell, Allanah Casey, Sophie Dickson and Julia Yesberg, and thanks also to Tadhg Daly for his invaluable assistance. The research was supported financially and practically by the New Zealand Department of Corrections, Victoria University of Wellington, and by Fulbright New Zealand.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The authors of the GLM use the term ‘risk management' to refer to the RNR model. But this term is confusing because the focus first and foremost of RNR-conforming interventions is on risk reduction, with the teaching of strategies to manage risk post-intervention a relatively small or non-existent part of these programmes. By contrast, sex-offender programmes, which did not adopt the RNR framework to the same extent as the mainstream correctional programmes, were instead for a time heavily invested in Relapse Prevention, a framework in which every aspect of treatment may be subsumed within a focus on risk management (e.g. Laws, 1989).

2 Although the GLM was not initially designed with desistance in mind, it was later adapted for a desistance focus (Laws & Ward, 2011).