Predicting Young Prisoner Desistance: A Longitudinal Analysis of Family, Support, and Desistance

• In Event: Desistance In and Out of Prison

Abstract

An entire body of scholarship is devoted to understanding what predicts adult prisoners’ desistance from crime. However, fewer studies have examined the desistance process among young prisoners. Current scholarship finds that former juvenile prisoners who continue to offend into adulthood are at greater risk for the intergenerational transmission of crime, face worse employment prospects, and attain fewer pro-social relationships. As a result, understanding this process may have severe implications for the hundreds of thousands of young prisoners incarcerated each year. Using the Pathways to Desistance dataset, this paper employs multilevel modeling to examine how several factors, including family and social support, influence young prisoner desistance. A greater understanding of the social processes of young prisoner desistance may help improve adult outcomes among this cohort.

Author

• Brae E. Campion, Florida State University