ABSTRACT
Interest in the “career criminal” in the early 1980s forced criminologists to become more concerned about dimensions of criminal offending other than onset—including duration, persistence of offending over time, escalation from less serious to more serious offending, and the eventual termination or desistance from crime. Desistance has received perhaps the most attention, with propositions and theories abounding about why people quit crime. Early understandings conceptualized desistance as a somewhat static event, the event of moving from a state of committing crime to a state of not committing crime. Gradually, however, scholars have begun to understand desistance not as an event but as a more dynamic process or evolution. Fagan (1989) was perhaps the first to recognize this, differentiating the process of desistance, defined as the reduction in the frequency and severity of offending, from the event of quitting crime. LeBlanc and Fréchette (1989) also referred to desistance as a set of processes that lead to the cessation of crime. They use the term “deceleration” to refer to a reduction in the frequency of offending prior to its cessation. More recently, Laub and Sampson (2001) explicitly separated the process of desistance from the termination of offending, which they viewed as the outcome of desistance.
