ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the findings of a research study conducted between 2009 and 2015 in Chile, Latin America, whose aim was to analyse the processes of desistance from crime among a male sample of formerly persistent offenders, assessing the extent to which international evidence could be applied to this non-Western sample. The biographies of 44 former male offenders born between 1939 and 1987 were explored in the context of two structural changes that are relevant for understanding how participants built their offending trajectories and how they departed from criminal activity. The first change was the economic development that resulted in growing access to social goods during the second half of the last century but was interrupted by the implementation of the neoliberal economic system during the military dictatorship in the 1970s; the second was the shift from an inquisitive to an adversarial justice system in 2000. The impact of these changes was apparent when contrasting the older with the younger participants. The desisters identified themselves with the ‘Old School’ of criminality, having built their identity around the values of honour, generosity, and solidarity that characterised the thieves of the days of the economic recession and the dictatorship. The younger participants lived in epochs of economic growth; their offending trajectories reflected more the impact of the changes in the criminal justice system, in particular, the cumulative negative effect of serving several short terms of imprisonment.