ABSTRACT
The age–crime curve suggests that most adolescent offenders start to desist from crime during their late teens and early twenties, yet many crime-involved youths persist in offending well into adulthood. This chapter explores offenders' accounts of change underlying persistence in offending among a sample of formerly-sanctioned, at-risk young adults who participated in the Pathways to Desistance Study in Philadelphia. It briefly reviews the idea of continuity and persistence in crime, highlighting the idea that qualitative change and intermittency might be obscured by apparent persistence in crime. The chapter presents semi-structured, life-history interviews to explore emerging themes regarding patterns underlying continuity in offending, including those factors offenders identify as contributors to persistence in crime in spite of adult role transitions commonly associated with desistance, such as parenthood. The patterns of behavior reflect the dynamic nature of crime during early adulthood that theories of desistance and persistence fail to adequately address.
