Treatment of Sex Offenders

13 Desistance from Crime: Toward an Integrated Conceptualization for Intervention
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1989 ; Loeber & Le Blanc, 1990 ). This perspective aims to understand the transition
from offending to non-offending, rather than non-offending itself. Bushway,
Piquero, Broidy, Cauffman, and Mazerolle ( 2001 ), for example, defined desistance
as the process of reduction in the rate of offending from a nonzero level to a stable
rate empirically indistinguishable from zero. In fact, research has shown that lambda
(i.e., the rate of offending) tends to decrease with age (Piquero et al., 2003 ). While
this specific formulation involves a near mathematical definition of desistance, the
theoretical focus is the understanding and specification of risk and protective factors
affecting the transition from offending to non-offending. This approach, for example,
leads to the important question of whether there are biological, individual,
social factors that can trigger the onset of desistance from crime. Indeed, for example,
building human and social capital is not immediate, it takes time, and consequently,
offending may, as a result, be characterized by intermittent periods of
offending (e.g., Sampson & Laub, 2003 ). In effect, desistance is described as a
process involving stages where gradual but not necessarily automatic or consistent
reduction of offending occurs prior to the termination of offending. Reoffending
lapses, therefore, are expected, but at a gradually and eventually lower rate until
termination. When traditional measures of recidivism (e.g., having been arrested for
a new offense) are used, persistent offenders and offenders in the process of desisting
can be confounded into a single category: the recidivist. 1 Drawing from concepts
in developmental psychology, Le Blanc and Fréchette ( 1989 ) were among the
first to operationalize the various parameters indicative of desistance from offending
using multiple offending indicators. According to this model, desistance is a
process whereby offending stops progressing (i.e., involvement in less serious
offenses), starts decelerating (i.e., offending rate is decreasing) and become more
patterned and specialized (i.e., increase tendency to commit fewer different crime
types) over time until complete termination of offending.
Comparing Desistance as an Event and a Process
Empirical studies usually conceptualize desistance as an event or as a process but
rarely both. Yet both conceptualizations considerably differ and this may lead to
different classification of persisters and desisters depending on the operationalization
chosen. This idea was first examined in the Bushway et al. ( 2003 ) study using
self-reported data from the Rochester Youth Development Study on the development
of general delinquent behavior among adolescents and young adults.
1
Conversely, intermittent offenders (i.e., active offenders), offenders in the process of desistance,
and offenders having completely desisted can be confounded into another misleading category: the
non-recidivists. In other words, individuals in a desistance phase may still be involved in crime and
continue to have contact with the justice system.