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7 - Desistance, social bonds, and human agency: a theoretical exploration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

By
Anthony Bottoms
Edited by
Per-Olof H. Wikström  and
Robert J. Sampson
Anthony Bottoms
Affiliation:
Professor University of Cambridge
Per-Olof H. Wikström
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Robert J. Sampson
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious.

(Wittgenstein, 1915; quoted in Sluga, 1996: 321)

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.

(Kierkegaard, 1843; quoted in Wollheim, 1984: 1)

Criminals are ipso facto beyond the moral community.

(Waddington, 2003: 395)

The SCoPiC Network aims to understand more fully both individuals' pathways into and out of crime, and the social contexts within which those pathways develop. Historically, however, there has been an interesting contrast between analyses of the onset and early development of criminal careers, and analyses of desistance from crime. The former have been predominantly individually and psychologically focused, and only recently has a more socially contextual approach been developed (see, for example, Wikström & Loeber, 2000). Desistance analyses, however, while markedly fewer in number than analyses of onset, have always tended to include at least some discussion of social context. For example, the well-known Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development has analyzed the effects of both locational change (Osborn, 1980) and marriage (Farrington & West, 1995) in relation to persistence in or desistance from crime in adulthood. In the early 1990s, one of the leading research studies on desistance (Sampson & Laub, 1993) also explicitly adopted a “social bonds” theoretical approach, arguing that “the stronger the adult ties to work and family, the less crime and deviance among [former] delinquents” (Laub & Sampson, 2003: 6; see further below).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Explanation of Crime
Context, Mechanisms and Development
 , pp. 243 - 290
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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