Treatment of Sex Offenders

13 Desistance from Crime: Toward an Integrated Conceptualization for Intervention
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criminogenic profiles do not guarantee a lifelong pattern of chronic serious and
violent offending. These assertions have several important theoretical, empirical,
methodological, and policy implications.
The concept of desistance from crime emerged in the scientific literature in the
late 1970s in the writings of criminal career researchers who were concerned with
the description and understanding the whole longitudinal sequence of individual
offending (e.g., Blumstein, Cohen, Roth, & Visher, 1986 ; Le Blanc & Fréchette,
1989 ). For criminal career researchers, the factors responsible for the onset, course,
and termination of offending were said to be relatively different. In other words,
individuals do not stop offending for the same reasons that they start offending or
escalate to more serious forms of crimes. While this concept seems relatively
straightforward, scholars have approached desistance differently over the years.
Several innovative studies aimed to describe and explain desistance from crime
among youth emerging from the corpus of developmental life course paradigm have
been conducted. The generalizability of the various desistance hypotheses that have
utilized longitudinal data from general and at-risk youth drawn from schools, however,
has been questioned. While this research, very importantly, has identified factors
associated with desistance around the adolescence–adulthood transition, these
findings are not necessarily generalizable to certain subgroups of youth involved in
serious, chronic, violent and/or sex offending. Most importantly, the representative
samples as well as those based on at-risk youth are not likely to include many
chronic juvenile offenders, young murderers, gang members, or juvenile sex offenders.
In other words, both theoretically and in policy terms, it is unclear whether the
current state of knowledge on desistance is readily generalizable to those youth
involved in the most serious forms of crimes or presenting the most serious patterns
of offending. More specifically, the current state of knowledge is rather limited
regarding these “special categories” of young offenders, therefore limiting the possibility
of drawing specific policy recommendations for the most serious juvenile
offenders (e.g., Rosenfeld, White, & Esbensen, 2012 ). In that regard, Cernkovich
and Giordano ( 2001 ) confirmed that social bonding mechanisms appear to operate
on general samples, but not with institutionalized samples of offenders, which
includes more serious offenders. Policy recommendations are also significantly limited
by the lack of a general consensus between scholars regarding the conceptual
definition of desistance. Indeed, researchers have mainly defined desistance from
crime as an event or a process. It is unclear, however, whether the conceptualization
of desistance either as an event or a process adequately represents the phenomena
for all individuals involved in sexual offenses.
The Conceptualization of Desistance from Crime
Among criminologists, there is a lack of a general agreement as to what constitute
desistance from crime. According to the Merriam-Webster, to desist refers to someone
who ceases something. This term comes from the French word désister which