Youth transitions: from offending to desistance

Abstract

This article examines youth transitions and youth offending in tandem. It argues that the transition to adulthood is heavily implicated in the fact that most offending occurs in the youth phase. Drawing on a study of 20 male and 20 female persistent young offenders in Scotland, it explores young people's desire for integration with others in the transition phases – with their families in childhood, with their friends in youth, and with the wider society in adulthood. During the youth phase, much of that integration comes from offending itself, whereas when more legitimate opportunities and sources of recognition are offered to them in early adulthood, desistance is more likely to occur.

Keywords:

• crime
• gender
• transition
• young adulthood

Notes

1. Giddens (1984) suggests that structures (rules and resources) are not only constraining but also enabling, albeit within limitations. Social actions tend to be routinized within the confines of structure but also reflexive.

2. Blumstein et al. (1988) suggest that there is a strong and invariant correlation between the level of crime and age, namely that the level of offending curve starts in the early teens, reaches a peak in the mid- to late teens, and then declines rapidly thereafter. This has been referred to by Farrington (1994, p. 521) as the ‘age–crime curve’.

3. I choose to use the word ‘maintenance’ rather than ‘persistence’, since the latter often suggests not only dogged obstinacy or purposefulness, but also increased frequency of offending. Maintenance, on the other hand, suggests the possibility of merely keeping going with offending, with or without purpose, and can denote a reduction as well as an increase in offending behaviour.

4. But see Bottoms et al. (2004), Harada (1995) and MacDonald and Marsh (2005).

5. Nevertheless, this sample of men did not apparently develop the kind of problem drug use experienced by the women, with only one young man mentioning being placed on a methadone prescription as a result of addiction compared with eight young women.