MASCULINITIES, PERSISTENCE, AND DESISTANCE

• Date: 01 August 2013
• Published date: 01 August 2013
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12016

MASCULINITIES, PERSISTENCE, AND

DESISTANCE∗

CHRISTOFFER CARLSSON

Department of Criminology

Stockholm University

KEYWORDS: masculinities, criminal careers, persistence, desistance, life-

history interviews

In life-course criminology, when gender has been the focus of study, it

has predominantly been treated as a variable. Studies that explore the

gendered nature of criminal careers through the lived experiences of

offenders are rare, even though these studies can make important con-

tributions to our understanding of crime and the life course. Analyzing

qualitative data, this article uses life-history narratives of a small sample

of male juvenile delinquents (N =25), born in 1969–1974, to explore

the possible link among masculinities, persistence, and desistance from

crime. The findings of the study suggest that processes of persistence and

desistance are imbued with age-specific norms of what it means to “be

a man” and successfully do masculinity in different stages of life. Ana-

lyzing these gender-specific practices gives a deepened understanding of

processes that underlie the offenders’ lives as they go through stages of

continuity and change in crime. The findings of the study further sug-

gest a complex intersection between gendered biographies and gendered

structures, with fruitful contributions to life-course criminology. The im-

plications of these findings are discussed.

Life-course criminology rose to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s

through initial explorations in the field of criminal careers (Blumstein et al.,

1986; Meisenhelder, 1977; Wolfgang, Figlio, and Sellin, 1972). The research

field has since then become dominant to the extent that Cullen argued

that “life course criminology now is criminology” (Cullen, 2011: 310). The

theoretical as well as methodological advances within this field also have

∗I thank Tove Pettersson and Jerzy Sarnecki at the Department of Criminology,

Stockholm University, for helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. I

am also grateful to Rosemary Gartner and four anonymous reviewers, whose com-

ments, suggestions, and guidance strengthened the article. Direct correspondence

to Christoffer Carlsson, Department of Criminology, Stockholm University, SE-

106 91 Stockholm, Sweden (e-mail: christoffer.carlsson@criminology.su.se).

C2013 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12016

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 51 Number 3 2013 661

662 CARLSSON

influenced criminology as a whole, including the practices and policies of

many criminal justice systems (Farrington, 2003).

Parallel to this development in the 1980s, a new branch of gender stud-

ies emerged focusing on men, masculinities, and crime. The basic in-

sight was that to “do crime” was, in many ways, to “do masculinity”

(Messerschmidt, 1993). Considering that most life-course studies of crime

predominantly have been conducted on male samples, it is remarkable that

so little focus has been directed on gender and masculinities. It is this under-

studied, possible link between masculinities and criminal careers I explore

in this study.

Whereas large-scale quantitative studies have established relationships

between changes in some areas of life (such as stable employment or re-

lationship formation) and subsequent changes in criminal offending, the

meanings they entail for offenders must be sought through in-depth studies

of individual lives. Such qualitative studies have contributed deeply to life-

course criminology (Ulmer and Spencer, 1999). The current study follows

in that tradition by applying the concepts of gender and “doing masculinity”

to a small but rich sample of life-history narratives. The meaning and impor-

tance of one’s gender grows out of the structured social practices in specific

settings, influencing the agencies and constraints of individuals. The fluidity

of such processes is perhaps best captured through in-depth, qualitative life

histories (Becker, 1966; Connell, 2005). Life histories, Connell noted (2005:

89), “give rich evidence about impersonal and collective processes as well

as subjectivity” and personal experience.

Using data collected in The Stockholm Life Course Project with a sam-

ple of male offenders born 1969–1974, this article thus uses life histories to

explore the possible link between masculinities and criminal careers, with a

focus on persistence and desistance from crime. The main contribution of

this study is the in-depth examination of the life-course processes related

to changes in criminal offending, and the possibility to study them in a rich

and detailed material, following the men up to 40 years of age. In the next

sections, I discuss the research field in more detail before I turn to method

and data. This section is followed by the study’s findings. I end the article

with a discussion of the study’s implications along with prospects for future

research.

THE LIFE COURSE, MASCULINITIES, AND CRIME

Hughes (1984 [1950]: 124) noted that the lives of people in a society tend

to unfold in “a certain order,” an order that to a great extent is “intentional

and institutionalized.” This structure often is reinforced through various

social policies (Settersten, 2003). In one sense, then, the life course can be

understood as a form of Durkheimian social fact (Durkheim, 1982 [1895]).

When we do that, we highlight its normative character: Social facts are ways

MASCULINITIES, PERSISTENCE, AND DESISTANCE 663

of feeling, acting, and thinking that are external to us as individuals, and

they exercise a coercive force on us. How people in a given society at a

given time live their lives is, to a certain extent, prestructured with expec-

tations from dominant institutions influencing us. In other words, the life

course is structured by expectations concerning what stages people should

go through, and when, for example, education in adolescence, moving out of

the family home at the end of adolescence, starting higher education and/or

entering the labor market in early adulthood, finding more stable employ-

ment and relationship and family formation in adulthood, retirement in late

adulthood, and so on. The life course thus often refers to a “sequence of cul-

turally defined age-graded roles and social transitions that are enacted over

time” (Caspi, Elder, and Herbener, 1990: 15).

Far from all individuals actually engage in every role at the same age,

but most tend to engage in most of them and at roughly the expected time

(Merton, 1984). These expectations, we must remember, are grounded in a

specific segment of Western societies—the male, White, heterosexual mid-

dle class—but individuals outside of that segment also are embedded in this

structure. They also can be expected to struggle more. How individuals ex-

perience social institutions, as well as their ability to make transitions into

and between them, are partly dependent on their “location in social struc-

tures of inequality, based on class, race, gender and other social statuses”

(Berger and Quinney, 2005: 167).

Arnett (2000) outlined the changes in age-norms with regard to the tran-

sition to adulthood that have taken place in many Western countries during

the past few decades, where transitions to adult social roles have been in-

creasingly postponed (Moffitt, 1993; see also Kimmel, 2008). Recent stud-

ies on the possible historical and structural influences on criminal careers

and desistance suggest that such dimensions may be important for a more

thorough understanding of continuity and change in criminal careers (e.g.,

Farrall, Bottoms, and Shapland, 2010). Farrall, Godfrey, and Cox (2009)

noted how the meaning of employment (in particular, among men) has

changed over time and how the institution of work as a factor contribut-

ing to desistance is contingent on specific forms of social organization. To

give a similar, Swedish example, not too long ago Sweden had a tax system

that economically favored marriage. Prior to 1971, a heterosexual couple, if

married, was taxed as a couple and not as individuals. After 1971, for lack

of economic reasons, couples may have opted more often to cohabitate, or

delay the transition to cohabitation and live longer in single households,

rather than to marry. It is likely that such changes are important when we

consider offenders’ desistance processes because cohabitation and marriage

are important predictors of desistance.

Whereas the life course might be less rigidly structured today than it was

in the 1950s, it is still normatively structured. In the Nordic countries, for ex-

ample, the normative step to marriage in the transition to adulthood might