Isabelle F.-Dufour

An Integrative Approach to Apprehend Desistance

The process underlying desistance is still a strong subject of debate. This article seeks to introduce several core concepts of Archer’s morphogenic approach to study how people desist from crime. At first, it discusses the primary existing theories of desistance. Then, this article demonstrates the usefulness of this approach by presenting empirical evidence drawn from semistructured interviews collected with 29 men who desisted from crime in an eastern province of Canada. The study demonstrates how this alternative approach allows for the consolidation of existing knowledge on desistance. Then implication of these findings for both theory and practice are discussed.

The convert, the remorseful and the rescued: Three different processes of desistance from crime

One of the key issues in research on criminal desistance is the impossibility of stating with any degree of certainty that an offenders criminal career is in fact over. When no clear demarcation line can be established for the precise moment when criminal activity has ended, researchers instead distinguish between the cessation of criminal behaviour and the process of desistance. A second issue lies in the contradictions inherent in explanatory theories on desistance that focus either on agents or, conversely, on the structures that provoke and support the process of change. An integrative theoretical framework on criminal desistance, influenced by the work of Margaret Archer (1995, 2000, 2002) and showing the interplay between structures and agents, can be found elsewhere (F.-Dufour, Brassard, and Martel, forthcoming). The application of this framework to empirical data collected from 29 Canadian offenders serving conditional sentences reveals the existence of three distinct processes leading to desistance among those we metaphorically call the transformed, the remorseful and the rescued.

Does the “last chance” sentence work? Ten years of failures and successes under a juvenile intermediate sanction in Canada:

Deferred custody and supervision order, an intermediate sanction which came into effect in 2003, had never been the subject of a scientific study. In the absence of research data, judges would give the sentence without knowing the outcome. To fill this gap, this study presents the failure rates (technical violations, revocations and new-crime violations) and success rates of all young Quebecers who completed a deferred custody and supervision order between 1 June 2003 and 31 May 2012. As with studies that examined similar sentences elsewhere in the world, success rates are relatively low. Suggestions are made to limit failures associated with this type of juvenile intermediate sanctions.