Missed Opportunities: Perspectives of Incarcerated Israeli Women and Men on Their Unsuccessful Desistance
| Date | 01 April 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1557085117724510 |
| Published date | 01 April 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2017
Article
Feminist Criminology
2019, Vol. 14(2) 241 –262
Missed Opportunities:
© The Author(s) 2017
Article reuse guidelines:
Perspectives of Incarcerated
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
https://doi.org/10.1177/1557085117724510
DOI: 10.1177/1557085117724510
journals.sagepub.com/home/fcx
Israeli Women and Men on
Their Unsuccessful Desistance
Keren Gueta1 and Gila Chen2
Abstract
The current study explores the factors that people incarcerated in Israeli prisons
identify as contributing to their unsuccessful desistance. Twenty in-depth interviews
were carried out with substance-involved men and women inmates. The findings
showed that they faced subjective and sociostructural problems, reflecting interlocking
axes of marginalization. However, the men and women constructed their narratives
of unsuccessful desistance according to traditional gender roles: The men’s accounts
were embedded in key concepts of masculinity such as unemployment, whereas
the women’s accounts related to feminine notions such as motherhood. Possible
implications for theory and intervention are discussed.
Keywords
desistance, recidivism, gender, qualitative, identity, parenthood, Israel
Introduction
The theoretical research of desistance from crime was greatly advanced by the seminal
work of Laub and Sampson (1993, 2003), which shed light on the pivotal role of pro-
social “turning points,” such as employment and marriages, in the desistance process.
Other scholars (Maruna, 2001; Paternoster & Bushway, 2009) have placed much
greater weight on individual-level factors, such as agency and identity transformation
in the desistance process. However, there is a need for deeper understanding based on
the integrated theories of desistance that take both structural and individual levels into
1Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
2Ashkelon Academic College, Israel
Corresponding Author:
Keren Gueta, Department of Criminology, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel.
Email: Keren.Gueta@biu.ac.il
242
Feminist Criminology 14(2)
account (Hannah-Moffat, 2015; LeBel, Burnett, Maruna, & Bushway, 2008).
Furthermore, according to the “desistance paradigm” (Maruna & LeBel, 2010), desis-
tance is not a “termination event” but rather a developmental process that may com-
prise many unsuccessful attempts before finally achieving and sustaining desistance.
It is therefore crucial to examine the success and failure of desistance to understand the
factors that lead to successful social reintegration from the perspective of people in
prison (Cobbina, 2010; Gueta, Chen,, 2015). Moreover, most empirical studies of the-
ories of desistance are based on male samples, and scholars have questioned the appli-
cability of those theories to women offenders, highlighting the need to investigate
gender-specific processes of desistance and recidivism (Rodermond, Kruttschnitt,
Slotboom, & Bijleveld, 2016). The present research seeks to fill this knowledge gap by
exploring both structural and individual factors that incarcerated Israeli men and
women identify as contributing to their failure to desist and examining the gendered
meaning of their accounts.
To address this aim, we utilized a theoretical framework that drew on a social con-
structionist analysis of gender roles to develop greater understanding of the gendered
construction and experience of unsuccessful desistance. The social constructionist
approach acknowledges gender as socially and materially constructed and emphasizes
the interaction, discourse, and interpretation that produce gender order (Gergen, 2001).
It views gender and gender roles as the result of the normative prescriptions of mascu-
linity and femininity that circulate in a given culture (Burr, 2015). Although “little
empirical research has addressed men as gendered criminal subjects” (Wyse, 2013, p.
232), the literature indicates that desistance factors, such as employment and relation-
ship, are gendered social institutions imbued with notions of masculinity and feminin-
ity (Carlsson, 2013; Opsal, 2012). For example, desistance was found to be linked to
masculinity- and age-specific ideals of autonomy, control, and independence.
Traditional gendered roles that emphasize “appropriate” conventional femininity (e.g.,
motherhood) were found to shape women’s self-concept and serve as catalyst for
desistance (Giordano, Cernkovich, & Rudolph, 2002). However, despite the highly
gendered employment arena, characterized by masculine ideals such as the “breadwin-
ner,” Opsal (2012) found that early in their reentry, women used employment to con-
struct prosocial replacement selves in their desistance narratives.
Background
Desistance, Recidivism, and Gender
Giordano et al. (2002) made an important contribution to the theoretical understanding
of the study of desistance by showing how sociostructural factors interact with and
inform human agency. Their theory of cognitive transformation posits that the desis-
tance process begins when individuals choose “hooks for change,” that is, prosocial
features of the environment, such as work or a romantic partner, that provide them an
opportunity to transform their identities. They listed four fundamental cognitive trans-
formations of self that initiate and eventually sustain change: (a) a shift in the actor’s
Gueta and Chen
243
basic openness to change, (b) the availability of hooks and the actor’s perception of the
hook in a particular positive way, (c) the ability of the actors to envision an appealing
and conventional “replacement self,” and (d) a transformation in the actors’ views of
the deviant behavior or lifestyle itself. In their analysis of data derived from a detailed
long-term follow-up of a sample of serious adolescent female and male delinquents,
Giordano et al. (2002) found that neither marital attachment nor job stability was
strongly related to female or male desistance. The authors also found gender sameness
in the repertoire of hooks for change that the participants described, the language they
used, and their descriptions of the entire change process, which they attributed to simi-
lar background factors, such as a dysfunctional family. However, they also found gen-
der differences: Women more often cited their children as catalysts for the changes
they had made, and the men attributed their changes more to prison or treatment.
In a more recent study, Farrall, Sharpe, Hunter, and Calverley (2011) presented a
theoretical framework that places high value on inner processes of desistance but also
acknowledges the pivotal importance of social structures. According to their inte-
grated perspective on structural and individual-level processes in desistance, the pro-
cess of identity construction is not an inner journey but is influenced by the wider
social environment in which men and women in the process of desistance are sub-
jected to a range of structural and psychological factors. Specifically, they argued that
“actors’ own perceptions of both institutional structures and their immediate surround-
ings are what guide their ‘choices’” (p. 230). This process is mediated by “softer”
emotions, such as hope, aspirations, and the culture of their immediate family.
Statistics have shown that more than four out of 10 people incarcerated return to
prison within 3 years of their release (Pew Center on the States, 2011). This alarmingly
high rate of recidivism places the task of successful reentry at the center of the crimi-
nal justice system efforts (Wright & Cesar, 2013). Given the diverse individual and
community-related factors regarding desistance, this data calls for a careful consider-
ation of not only “what works” in reentry but also “what works for whom” in respect
to gender (Holtfreter & Wattanaporn, 2014). This is particularly important since
women are one of the fastest growing sectors of the prison population (Guerino,
Harrison, & Sabol, 2011). Women’s problems with the law tend to be related to sub-
stance abuse, and this growth is therefore attributed to stricter policies on drug offenses
(Hannah-Moffat, 2015).
Gender differences have also been demonstrated within the sociostructural factors.
The contribution of marriage and intimate relationships to desistance has been well-
documented (Laub & Sampson, 2003; Van Schellen, Apel, & Nieuwbeerta, 2012),
showing that they contribute to desistance by creating direct social control that encour-
ages more positive routine activities which inhibit involvement in criminal activity
and raise the cost of offending (Herrera, Wiersma, & Cleveland, 2010). However, the
characteristics of the partners of men offenders, typically women who have had no
illegal involvement, in contrast to the partners of women offenders, have led Laub and
Sampson (2003) to poignantly ask, marriage is “good for whom?” (p. 46). It has been
shown that the limited availability of prosocial spouses for women living in high-
crime neighborhoods leads women to avoid intimate relationships in favor of
244
Feminist Criminology 14(2)
desistance (Leverentz, 2006). Although some researchers have indeed found that the
positive influence of marriage on desistance is much more prevalent among men than
among women (Doherty & Ensminger, 2013; Zoutewelle-Terovan, van der Geest,
Liefbroer, & Bijleveld, 2012), others have claimed that marriage and intimate relation-
ships are much more beneficial to women (Cobbina,...
To continue reading
Request your trial