Positive Expected Selves and Desistance among Serious Adolescent Offenders

• In Event: Turning Points and Typologies: Understanding Trajectories of Change in Criminal Behavior

Abstract

Despite a recent surge of interest in a role that self-identity plays in the process of desistance from crime, prior research has been mostly qualitative and conducted with small samples of adult offenders. In addition, while the perception of what people expect to become in the future can also function as motivational and sustaining forces toward prosocial behavioral outcomes by providing incentives for guided actions through relevant plans and strategies, many empirical tests of identity-based theories of crime and delinquency have adopted measures of current self-identity. Drawing on a broad range of theoretical perspectives inside and outside of criminology and longitudinal panel data collected from a sample of adolescent offenders, this study tests whether a shift in a youth’s expectation of positive selves in the future relates to a downward trend in offending and arrest. A modified version of negative binomial random-effects models with between- and within-individual transformations of time-varying covariates is applied to estimate the within-individual effects of the predictor on the subsequent outcomes after controlling for all the time-stable and some important time-varying sources of potential confounders.

Authors

• Chongmin Na, John Jay College of Criminal Justice / The Graduate Center, CUNY

• Sung Joon Jang, Baylor University