ABSTRACT
The capacity of life course transitions, such as employment and marriage, to modify offending trajectories is a central concern of life course criminology (Fagan and Freeman 1999; Uggen and Wakefield 2008; Bushway 2011). Echoing the sociological distinction between structure and agency (Bottoms et al. 2004), the desistance literature offers two basic accounts of how life course transitions may exert causal influence on criminal behaviour: the turning point and the hook-for-change hypotheses (Sampson and Laub 1993; Giordano et al. 2002). In addition, challenging the causal interpretation, the maturation perspective expects transitions to adult social roles to follow rather than precede desistance from crime (Hirschi and Gottfredson 1983; Morizot and Le Blanc 2007).
