CHANGES IN CRIMINAL OFFENDING AROUND THE TIME OF JOB ENTRY: A STUDY OF EMPLOYMENT AND DESISTANCE

• Published date: 01 May 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12037
• Date: 01 May 2014

CHANGES IN CRIMINAL OFFENDING AROUND THE

TIME OF JOB ENTRY: A STUDY OF EMPLOYMENT

AND DESISTANCE∗

TORBJØRN SKARDHAMAR1and JUKKA SAVOLAINEN2

1Research Department, Statistics Norway

2School of Criminology, University of Nebraska at Omaha

KEYWORDS: desistance, employment, Norway, life-course criminology

Does employment promote desistance from crime? Most perspectives assume that

individuals who become employed are less likely to offend than those who do not.

The critical issue has to do with the timing of employment transitions in the criminal

trajectory. The turning point hypothesis expects reductions in offending after job en-

tries, whereas the maturation perspective assumes desistance to have occurred ahead

of successful transitions to legitimate work. Focusing on a sample of recidivist males

who became employed during 2001–2006 (N =783), smoothing spline regression tech-

niques were used to model changes in criminal offending around the point of entry to

stable employment. Consistent with the maturation perspective, the results showed that

most offenders had desisted prior to the employment transition and that becoming em-

ployed was not associated with further reductions in criminal behavior. Consistent with

the turning point hypothesis, we identified a subset of offenders who became employed

during an active phase of the criminal career and experienced substantial reductions

in criminal offending thereafter. However, this trajectory describes less than 2 percent

of the sample. The patterns observed in this research suggest that transition to employ-

ment is best viewed as a consequence rather than as a cause of criminal desistance.

The relationship between employment and offending is an enduring topic of crimino-

logical inquiry (Bushway, 2011; Fagan and Freeman, 1999; Uggen and Wakefield, 2008).

The focus of the current study is on the role of employment in criminal desistance,

which is defined as the process whereby active offenders reduce and eventually terminate

their criminal careers. Echoing the sociological distinction between structure and agency

(Bottoms et al., 2004), the desistance literature offers two accounts of the causal influence

of employment: the turning point and the hook-for-change hypotheses. In addition, the

∗Additional supporting information can be found in the listing for this article in the

Wiley Online Library at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/crim.2011.52.issue-2/issuetoc.

We thank Torbjørn Hægeland, David Greenberg, Kjetil Telle, and the three anonymous re-

viewers for their critical observations and helpful suggestions. We are particularly grateful to

Lorine Hughes and D. Wayne Osgood for providing detailed comments of crucial value on mul-

tiple drafts of the article. This research has received financial support from the Norwegian Re-

search Council (grant 202453). Direct correspondence to Jukka Savolainen, School of Crimi-

nology, University of Nebraska at Omaha, 321 Nebraska Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0561 (e-mail:

jsavolainen@unomaha.edu).

C2014 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12037

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 52 Number 2 263–291 2014 263

264 SKARDHAMAR & SAVOLAINEN

maturation perspective assumes that employment is best understood as a consequence

rather than as a cause of desistance from crime.

The turning point hypothesis treats employment as an exogenous event with the po-

tential to set in motion the process of desistance (Laub and Sampson, 2003; Sampson

and Laub, 1993). According to this perspective, desistance happens as an inadvertent

response to changes in one’s objective life situation. Laub and Sampson (2003: 278–9)

used the term desistance by default to describe this outcome: “Many men made a commit-

ment to go straight without even realizing it. Before they knew it, they had invested so

much time in a marriage or a job that they did not want to risk losing their investment.”

Although Laub and Sampson recognized the role of individual agency, they maintained

that “most offenders desist in response to structurally induced turning points that serve as

the catalyst for sustaining long term behavioral change” (Laub and Sampson, 2003: 147).

The strong causality suggested by the turning point hypothesis has been qualified by

scholars who view subjective change as a precondition for successful exit from a criminal

lifestyle (Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph, 2002; LeBel et al., 2008; Maruna, 2001).

For example, Bushway and Reuter (1997) have argued that employment is unlikely to

facilitate desistance in the absence of true commitment to “go straight.” Giordano and

colleagues have advanced a theory of cognitive transformation that—extending the in-

vestment analogy—argued that “actors themselves must recognize the need to start saving

and develop a high level commitment to the plan” (Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph

2002: 1056). According to this perspective, life-course transitions are unlikely to result

in lasting changes in behavior without strong personal desire to undertake a conversion

effort. However, for these intentions to materialize, it may be important to find tangible

“hooks for change” in the everyday environment. Thus, under this theory, employment

has the potential to sustain and reinforce the emerging process of desistance.1

Additional strands of criminological theory are skeptical of causal interpretations of

either variety (Glueck and Glueck, 1974; Hirschi and Gottfredson, 1983; Morizot and

Le Blanc, 2007). These perspectives explain the longitudinal association between steady

employment and declining criminal activity as a spurious function of maturational reform

(i.e., the age-varying process of “settling down”) (Massoglia and Uggen, 2010). Under this

model, it would be unrealistic to expect successful employment transitions to occur during

an active phase of the criminal trajectory. Adults who persist in offending face serious

obstacles in the labor market as a direct result of their criminal lifestyle (Pager, 2003).

Moreover, as observed by Massoglia and Uggen (2010), active offenders are unlikely to

regard themselves as capable of taking on social roles associated with mature adulthood.

The maturation perspective goes one step further than the hook-for-change hypothesis in

that it assumes sustained behavioral transformation, not mere psychological readiness, as

a precondition for successful labor market transitions.

Regardless of their positions on causality, each of these three hypotheses implies a

negative longitudinal association between employment and crime: The average rate of

offending is expected to be higher during the pre-employment period under each per-

spective. As described in figure 1, the main point of contention has to do with the timing

of employment in this process. The turning point hypothesis predicts gradual reductions

1. Following LeBel et al. (2008), this process also could be described as a “subjective-social model”

of employment and desistance. We find the two perspectives highly compatible in that each treats

the impact of objective life circumstances as secondary to the subjective intent to change.