Value orientations, life transitions, and desistance: Assessing competing perspectives

Abstract

Laub and Sampson (2003) and Paternoster and Bushway (2009) offered opposing explanations of desistance from crime. Yet, extant research has failed to test the key theoretical differences that distinguish these perspectives: 1) the temporal ordering of internal changes in identity/values and life transitions and 2) the impact of values/life transitions on offending conditional on key predictors from the opposing theory (e.g., whether marriage contributes to desistance among individuals who already hold prosocial values). We assess competing claims using data from the Pathways to Desistance. We find that within-person changes in prosocial value orientations are significantly related to within-person changes in one's likelihood of entering into serious romantic relationships and becoming employed. Conversely, life transitions are unrelated to changes in one's values. The results derived from fixed-effects Poisson models indicate high or increasing prosocial value orientations help explain offending patterns among those who enter into serious romantic relationships/get employed and help explain changes in offending among those who do not experience structural "turning points." Marriage/cohabitation is unrelated to within-person changes in offending, whereas the impact of employment has an inconsistent relationship. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

Predicting Future Recidivism From Changes in School Grades and Moral Agency

“…Further analysis led the authors to conclude that employment should be construed a consequence rather than a cause of desistance. Thomas et al (2023) also examined the connection between employment and desistance and obtained inconclusive results. In a study on military service and criminal justice involvement, Teachman and Tedrow (2016) determined that nonviolent crime, but not violent crime, decreased following a person's entry into the military.…”

“…In a review of 58 studies on the relationship between marriage and crime, Skardhamar et al (2015) discovered that, despite finding an association between marriage and crime, particularly when relationship quality was rated as good, there were no studies that showed a direct causal connection between the two variables unbiased by selection factors. More recently, Thomas and colleagues (2023) determined that marriage/cohabitation was unrelated to within-person change in offending. With respect to employment, Skardhamar and Savolainen (2014) identified a small group of offenders who became employed during an active phase of their criminal career and experienced substantial reductions in criminal offending as a result, although this accounted for less than 2% of participants.…”

Revisiting the relationship between age, employment, and recidivism

“…A central contention of Gottfredson and Hirschi (1990) and Paternoster and Bushway (2009) is that individuals themselves likely change prior to gaining a job— often in unobservable ways (e.g., changes in identity). In this way, the employment–crime relationship may be spurious to other (perhaps unobserved) factors, such as changes in identities or value orientations (Thomas et al., 2023). As noted, observational studies assessing employment effects have not been particularly convincing (Lageson & Uggen, 2013), and evaluations of work programs overall have pointed to mixed—and null—conclusions (Apel, 2011; Bushway & Apel, 2012; Bushway & Reuter, 2004; Cook et al., 2015; Visher et al., 2005).…”

Sociohistorical context and post-prison life course

“…The "hook for change" theory occupies the middle ground between the two, claiming that the first steps in desistance are taken earlier, but that gaining employment expedites the process (Laub and Sampson 1993). Recent results by Thomas et al (2022) support the maturation perspective by suggesting that transitions to employment and marriage are preceded by changes in values. Similarly, in the Norwegian context, it has been observed that offending frequency falls before entry into employment (Skardhamar and Savolainen 2014).…”