ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of desistance scholarship, surveying some of the major theoretical and empirical explanations of how and why people stop offending, and exploring the implications of this body of work for criminal justice. Despite an international body of knowledge developed over decades about how and why people desist from crime, defining what desistance is and figuring out how such a definition might be operationalised present enduring problems. Desistance theories are usually clustered into three or four theoretical perspectives: ontogenic desistance, sociogenic desistance, and identity theories. Recently, in addition to ontogenic, sociogenic and identity theories, Bottoms has suggested a fourth set of factors relevant to desistance that are situational in character. Scholarship concentrated on how and why people stop offending, perhaps foreseeably, attracts concerns that it ignores or detracts from wider influences beyond the individual. Ruth Levitas defines utopia as 'the expression of the desire for a better way of being or of living'.
