centre criminalized and marginalized people's voices as essential to our understanding of punishment, law, and justice, as well as on-thegroundwork by people toward change and reform. JPP positions actors in justice as experts and highlights their identities as much more than their legal status of 'off ender'. The journal seeks to situate the essence of incarceration and reentry (as well as of being criminalized and striving to remove the label of 'criminal') within lived experiences. In this Special Issue, we engage with an area of criminological research that has sought to endorse precisely these principles almost from its origins: desistance from crime.First emerging as a fi eld of study around the turn of the last century (see Farrall, 2002;Giordano, Cernkovich & Rudolph, 2002; Maruna, 2001;Laub & Sampson, 2001), desistance from crime has in recent years become an almost ubiquitous concept in academic criminology and criminal justice (see Sered, 2021;Bersani & Doherty, 2018). Conceptually, desistance theory has served to expand, refi ne, and challenge the more traditional concepts of reintegration, rehabilitation, and recidivism (see McNeill, 2012;Ward & Maruna, 2007), inspiring rich and varied empirical studies on how criminalized people manage to re-build their lives in the face of structural marginalization, socio-economic disadvantage, and stigma (see Abrams & Terry, 2017;Richardson & Vil, 2016). Yet, beyond providing a conceptual and empirical hook to those interested in punishment, crime, and justice, desistance theory has a wider and also deeper signifi cancedesistance signals a broader shift in how societies ought to think about crime, criminalized people, and recovery. To this extent, desistance pushes academics to re-think their representation of criminalized people's voices in academia, while encouraging scholarly work and grassroots reforms aimed at (re-)building a criminal legal system that emphasizes compassion, humanity, and well-being over exclusion, stigma, and distrust (see Hart & Van Ginneken, 2017;Maruna, 2017). Like the JPP itself, the engine driving so much desistance theory and research is the concept of lived experience and the wisdom that can only be gained from listening to those who have themselves escaped the cycle of crime and justice (