ABSTRACT
Studies over the past decades have provided a great deal of information about the criminal careers of male offenders. This chapter describes how 30 women with long histories of criminal involvement changed their perspectives toward life and criminal behavior. Changes in criminal behavior occurred as a result of a three-stage process: building resolve or discovering motivation to stop, making and publicly disclosing the decision to stop, and maintaining new behaviors and integration into new social networks. Desistance appears to be a process as complex and lengthy as the processes of initial involvement. The responses by social control agents, family members, and peer supporters to further criminal participation are critical to shaping the outcome of discontinuance. Cessation is part of a social-psychological transformation for the offender. A strategy to stabilize the transition to a noncriminal lifestyle requires active use of supports to maintain the norms that have been substituted for the forces that supported criminal behavior in the past.
