Gender, Cognitive Transformation and Desistance from Crime

• In Event: Roundtable: Gender and Crime

Abstract

Despite its widespread use, critics of social control theory point out that it primarily emphasizes institutions and social networks but ignores the role of agency in the desistance process (Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph 2002). Another theoretical limitation centers on the oversampling of predominantly white male offenders, resulting in some ambiguity about the theory’s generalizability to contemporary, female or minority offenders. Giordano and colleagues developed cognitive transformation theory in an effort to address these gaps. Building off this work, we use cognitive transformation theory to explore the relationship between gender, desistance and identity transformation for a sample of adolescents transitioning into adulthood in the United States in the 1990s. Using multivariate analyses of data drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, we investigate the impact of socio-demographic characteristics, hooks for change and cognitive transformation on self-reported criminal behavior and arrest. Our study shows support for both structure and agency in the desistance process. We find that enrollment in higher education and job stability significantly reduces the likelihood of arrest for men. Conversely, women who envisioned an increased chance of working in the future had decreased chances of arrest, compared to women whose future expectations remained the same or diminished.

Authors

• Annika Yvette Anderson, California State University, San Bernardino

• Sharon Suzanne Oselin, University of California, Riverside