Desistance and Identity: Do Reflected Appraisals as a Delinquent Impede the Crime-Reducing Effects of the Adolescent-to-Adult Transition?

• Author: Glenn D. Walters
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016819899133
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Desistance and Identity:

Do Reflected Appraisals

as a Delinquent Impede

the Crime-Reducing Effects

of the Adolescent-to-Adult

Transition?

Glenn D. Walters

1

Abstract

Desistance from crime can occur at any age but is most likely to occur during the adolescence-to-

adult transition. The purpose of this study was to determine whether one facet of a criminal identity

(i.e., reflected appraisals as a delinquent) impedes future desistance in male youth making the

transition from adolescence to adulthood, controlling for family structure, social influence, low self-

control, prior delinquency, and age of delinquency onset. Longitudinal data furnished by 284

members of the Marion County Youth Study, all of whom were male and 98% of whom were White,

each with histories of delinquency, were subjected to binary logistic regression analysis and causal

mediation analysis. Results indicated that reflected appraisals correlated negatively with desistance

and successfully mediated the inverse relationship between number of prior delinquent contacts and

subsequent desistance from crime between the ages of 19 and 26. Considering the role reflected

appraisals appear to play in the development of a criminal identity, it is speculated that targeting

reflected appraisals as a delinquent should be of value in maximizing the number of juveniles who

desist from crime during the adolescence-to-adult transition.

Keywords

reflected appraisals, juvenile delinquency, desistance from crime

Evidence of crime continuity is strong (Nagin & Paternoster, 2000; Walters, 2016a). Despite this, a

substantial portion of delinquen ts, even serious ones, do not go on t o become adult criminals.

Collating the results of a large-scale 14-year longitudinal study of youth in Montreal, Canada, Le

Blanc and Fr´echette (1989) determined that approximately 30–60%of juveniles arrested by the

1

Department of Criminal Justice, Kutztown University, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Glenn D. Walters, Department of Criminal Justice, Kutztown University, 361 Old Main, Kutztown, PA 19530, USA.

Email: walters@kutztown.edu

Criminal Justice Review

2020, Vol. 45(3) 303-318

ª2020 Georgia State University

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DOI: 10.1177/0734016819899133

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police or convicted of a crime had a history of subsequent adult arrest. By the process of elimination,

40–70%had no adult arrests. And while some of these individuals may have committed crimes as an

adult and simply not got caught, many others could very well have desisted from crime as part of

the adolescent-to-adult transition. A little over a decade later, a review of longitudinal data from the

Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD) uncovered similar results. Only 45%of the

CSDD cohort members with a juvenile record were arrested between the ages of 25 and 32 (Far-

rington, 2003). Since then, Stouthamer-Loeber (2010) demonstrated that 52–57%of a group of

juvenile delinquents from the Pittsburgh Youth Study continued to offend during early adulthood

(ages 20–25), while only 16–19%offended between the ages of 26 and 30. These findings suggest

that there is both continuity and change in offending behavior as juvenile lawbreakers approach

adulthood. The purpose of the current investigation was to ascertain whether criminal identity in the

form of reflected appraisals of delin quency impedes desistance from crim inal offending at the

adolescent-to-adult transition.

Theories of Desistance

Although there is a large body of evidence indicating that early adult desistance from crime is a

common occurrence, less is known about the mechanisms by which youth desist from crime as they

enter adulthood. Several viable explanations nonetheless exist, one of which is Sampson and Laub’s

(1993) age-graded theory of informal social control. According to Laub and Sampson (2001),

desistance in early adulthood is often the result of turning points in a person’s life, two of which

are marriage and employment. In an effort to explain how turning points lead to desistance, Sampson

and Laub (2005) outlined ways in which marriage and/or employment could inhibit future offend-

ing: (1) by encouraging a “knifing off” of one’s criminal past, (2) by providing new avenues of social

support, (3) by expanding direct and indirect control and supervision, (4) by increasing involvement

in structured activities, and (5) by stimulating a transformation in identity. It is the last of these

possibilities that is featured in the current investigation. Others, such as Giordano et al. (2007) and

Maruna (2001) have tied desistance to a change in identity as well, but no theory has had as much

impact on theory and research in the field of desistance as Paternoster and Bushway’s (2009;

Bushway & Paternoster, 2011, 2013) identity theory of desistance (ITD).

The ITD holds that desistance is a gradual process that does not occur until the perceived costs of

crime begin to outweigh the perceived benefits. When this occurs, present failures inform future

failures, and an antisocial identi ty is gradually replaced by a prosoc ial identity (Paternoster &

Bushway, 2009). A major premise of ITD is that a change in identity from antisocial to prosocial

precedes a change in positive social relationships rather than the other way around (Bushway &

Paternoster, 2013). Various feared future selves of what one could become with continued involve-

ment in a criminal lifestyle then reinforce the new belief system (Bushway & Paternoster, 2011).

Working selves, possible selves, future selves, and human agency figure prominently in ITD.

Although ITD is new on the horizon, it has attracted a fair amount of empirical attention to date.

Whether qualitative (Bachman et al., 2016) or quantitative (Rocque et al., 2016) data are brought to

bear on the issue, studies indicate that transforming an offender identity into a prosocial identity is

followed by a significant drop in future offending. The human agency or choice features of ITD have

also received support in qualitative and quantitative studies (King, 2012; Paternoster et al., 2016;

Stone, 2016).

ITD has been studied almost exclusively in samples of adult inmates. In addition, it focuses

primarily on cognitive changes occurring over an extended period of time. Even so, there is no

reason why other cognitively based identity issues could not also play a role in the more normative

and rapid changes that promote desistance during the adolescent-to-adult transition. According to

ITD, the negative consequences of a criminal lifestyle accumulate over time to the point where the

304 Criminal Justice Review 45(3)