Emotions and identity transformation

Scholarly work over the last few decades has greatly increased our understanding of how people desist from crime. It is now widely accepted that the desistance process involves a complex interplay of aging/maturation, increased social capital and social ties, and subjective changes and shifts in self-identity (McNeill, 2009; McNeill and Weaver, 2010). More recently this work has laid the foundations for discussion and exploration of how criminal justice based rehabilitative efforts may work to facilitate and support this process, responding to previous research which suggested that such interventions - including probation supervision - have little positive impact (Farrall, 2002). However, reflecting the trajectory of 'traditional' criminological thinking about the onset and persistence of criminal behaviour, the focus of much desistance research on white, male offenders has been accepted implicitly. Consequently, thinking about the relationship between gender, masculinities, race/ethnicity and other dimensions of diversity and desistance is arguably still in its infancy. This chapter discusses the methodological approach and some of the key findings of doctoral research which adopted a narrative inquiry design to further explore the subjectivity or lived experience of desistance and within this the meaning of rehabilitative efforts to desisters. A series of narrative interviews with a cohort of male probationers who were assessed as desisters revealed that both the onset/escalation of their offending and desistance were gendered processes, with desistance involving a complex and contingent reconstruction of masculine identity. This chapter explores these processes, namely how these men were able to able to negotiate and reconstruct their masculinities in the course of their biographies.