ABSTRACT
Although studies of desistance have routinely focussed on how family formation, gaining employment, moving away from criminal friends and identity reconstruction support stopping offending, they have up until recently been less vocal in how meso- and macro-level structural influences might shape these and other processes that we know are related to desistance. This is arguably a somewhat surprising oversight in attention, given the known interaction between structure and agency in producing such processes, and one that is now being duly being addressed (see Farrall et al., 2011, 2014; Chapter 1). However, any exploration of how various structural forces affect desistance needs a framework through which to view, compare and examine these processes. This chapter argues that ethnicity provides an appropriate optic for illuminating our understanding. It reports on a study which explored desistance amongst male offenders from three of the UK’s largest ethnic minority groups: Black-British, Bangladeshis and Indians. Its findings suggest that desistance, whilst embodying agency, is also shaped in crucially important ways by community and familial resources and cultural processes.
