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The Law, Practice and Experience of ‘Conditional Freedom’ in Chile: No Man’s Land
Abstract
A parole scheme was created in Chile in 1925, with the aim of modernising the prison system by introducing a mechanism of progressive release that promoted inmates’ social reintegration. Almost a century later, parole is being marginally used and its function of reintegration is questioned. This chapter expects to shed light on the legal framework, practice and experience of parole that make it a controversial tool for desistance and reintegration. The chapter is informed by interviews with two magistrates that have participated in Parole Commissions, four practitioners that have been involved in diverse stages of parole application and granting, and ten parolees. First, we outline the legal scheme of Chilean parole, starting with a brief description of the Criminal Justice System for readers not familiarised with it. In the second part, the experiences of practitioners and parolees are analysed in the light of the desistance framework, showing that the current parole practices do not support and even hinder the process of crime abandonment. Finally, the discussion reflects on the findings and recommends areas of improvement that can contribute to the understanding of parole and to improve its application in Chile.
... Whereas the NOMS in the UK and the Dutch rehabilitation policies include offender management strategies, in Latin America, for instance, rehabilitative policies are not common (Sanhueza et al., 2018). In most Latin American countries, the criminal justice system is punitive and focuses on retribution and control, without formal guidelines on prisoner support (Sanhueza et al., 2018;Villagra & Droppelmann, 2016). Reintegration efforts often depend on the goodwill of social workers and other professionals (Villagra & Droppelmann, 2016). ...
... In most Latin American countries, the criminal justice system is punitive and focuses on retribution and control, without formal guidelines on prisoner support (Sanhueza et al., 2018;Villagra & Droppelmann, 2016). Reintegration efforts often depend on the goodwill of social workers and other professionals (Villagra & Droppelmann, 2016). Also, poor infrastructure and the fact that prison research is still developing in Latin America (Sanhueza et al., 2021) makes it difficult to get political and economic support for rehabilitative policies. ...
Ex-prisoners often experience barriers to successful transition regarding employment, finances, housing, healthcare, and valid identification. Based on the Offender Management framework, assistance during imprisonment by prison- and community-based professionals is considered key in preparing prisoners for release regarding these reintegration needs. Therefore, the current study examines the degree to which prisoners with reintegration needs are assisted by relevant professionals. We used self-reported data from 4,309 prisoners of the Dutch Prison Visitation Study, part of the Life in Custody Study. The results showed that prisoners have more contact with prison-based than with community-based professionals, but that the latter relatively often have contact with prisoners with related reintegration needs. Yet, a specific group of prisoners with reintegration needs remains invisible. Prisoners with complex, health, or valid identification needs, and prisoners in the start or pre-release phase require further attention. It is discussed what can be learned from these findings on Dutch Offender Management practices.
... (b) The parole board that is informed by the technical council reports and decides on the applications for parole. They have been widely criticized for various reasons, but mainly for their little use and scarce support in social reintegration processes (Figueroa Ossa, 2020;Ossa, 2018;Villagra & Droppelmann, 2016). (c) The Corporación de Asistencia Judicial (CAJ) (Legal Aid Corporation), is a decentralized public service whose mission is to provide guidance and legal aid to persons who need support and legally represent them (Law 17.995 that established the Legal Aid Corporation, 1981). ...
This article sought to understand the adequacy of criminal defense services within prisons. By analyzing secondary data and interviews, it describes the justiciable problems and legal needs, the lines of action, and the obstacles that the adult prison population encounters. The results show that the experience and needs that arise in prison surpass the institutional capabilities of the chilean Public Defender’s Office. Therefore, a new institutional framework must be created to meet the justice claims of prisoners.
... This may also partly account for the finding that there appears to be a minimum standard regarding facilitation, even though prisons were allowed to set their own rules within these boundaries. Moreover, in other parts of the world, there are often complaints about poor infrastructure and little attention to rehabilitation (Villagra & Droppelmann, 2016). In such contexts, the facilitation of prisons might be evaluated more poorly, increasing the chances of a deterrent effect on professional visitation. ...
Reintegration support by community-based professionals and volunteers (CBPs) is needed to prepare prisoners for release. Yet, the way in which CBPs are received, informed and accommodated, may hamper in-prison involvement. Therefore, the current study explores the visit facilitation and accessibility of prisons in the Netherlands as experienced by CBPs. A new instrument to measure facilitation and accessibility across institutions is introduced. The findings among 4,309 prisoners and 1,077 professionals across 24 Dutch prisons revealed that although institutions differ in facilitation and accessibility, this is unrelated to prison visits received from most CBPs, apart from the likelihood of receiving visits from parole officers. The study confirms the importance of considering facilitation and accessibility in relation to in-prison involvement of external agencies.
This paper discusses in theoretical and practical terms how the Desistance Paradigm offers a powerful and underexplored potential alliance with Therapeutic Jurisprudence, especially regarding the social reintegration of those who break the law. As such, this paper presents a description of the Therapeutic Justice and Desistance Paradigm, along with their main findings and theoretical scope, to then present a discussion of how these two approaches share a common horizon (which are not only limited to practices and techniques, but also to legal structures and procedures). Finally, it concludes with some future challenges for which the convergence of these two paradigms can offer fruitful developments within the criminal justice system.
This article focuses on the growing difficult realities of moving from prison to the community. It refers to several narratives of people who have experienced-and struggled-with the transition, and also sheds some light on the relevance of creating and supporting programs that promote family and community bonding. This article also emphasizes the importance of giving people the chance to redeem themselves and start over.
The idea of a reentry court for ex-convicts returning to the community is an important new idea, but the premise behind it is rather familiar. Most of the models developed for reentry courts are based on what former Attorney General Janet Reno referred to as a "carrot and stick" philosophy, mixing heightened surveillance with additional treatment and other resources. In this paper, we briefly review the empirical and theoretical evidence in favor of this approach. We argue that an emerging policy narrative - which we refer to as "strengths-based" - holds considerable promise as an alternative or an addition to traditional talk of carrots and sticks. We describe a variety of strengths-based practices in corrections and drug addiction treatment and consider the psychological theory and research in support of this new narrative. Finally, we describe how a strengths-based reentry court would differ from more traditional models.
The article considers current developments in the ‘resettlement’ of prisoners in the light of recent theory and research on factors promoting desistance from crime. While recognizing improvements promised by the Reducing Re-offending National Action Plan and the concept of ‘end-to-end’ offender management, it is argued that these are unlikely to reduce re-offending significantly without greater attention to individual offenders' mental processes and levels of selfmotivation, which are identified by the desistance literature (as well as much of the ‘what works’ literature) as critical factors in personal change. An account is given of a promising approach adopted in the ‘Resettlement Pathfinders’, where a cognitive-motivational programme was combined with practical services, with encouraging early results. However, concerns are expressed that even the most innovative approaches may be undermined by features of the broader context within which correctional services are delivered, including an excessive emphasis on enforcement (which makes no allowance for the ‘zigzag’ nature of desistance) and the potentially negative impact of ‘contestability’ on relational continuity.
Given her vast practical and academic experience in release processes, Martine Herzog-Evans set out in this volume to assemble a group of international experts (mostly from Europe and some from the US) to detail and comment on the release systems in which they worked. These included the full-range of structures: automatic release, discretionary release, executive branch release, judicially-authorized release, as well as some " blended " release families. From the rich data and commentary, Herzog-Evans set out to answer two questions: " firstly, is automatic release early system at a given point in time(e.g, half or third-point)better than a discretionary release system whereby a court, a judge, a commission, a board or an individual, decides based on a series of parameters, be they behavioural, social, psychological or criminological; secondly, which is the best, an early release system whereby an executive body or individual makes the decision or a system where this decision-making belongs to a judicial body(a court or judge)? " Spoiler alert: There was no clear-cut winner. Empirically, " it would probably be next to impossible to …. test the executive versus judiciary question; and it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to empirically test the automatic versus discretionary release hypothesis. " And on the normative side, we run into another type of washout: Is it fairer to have an automatic release system, where all are treated equally(but where some may be released before they are ready and others are not released until some time after they are ready)?—or is it more fair to have a discretionary release system where there may be some ambiguity and unequal treatment of comparable persons, but where the " justiciables " have some agency, some voice, some possible payoff for thinking through their hopes, plans, and future?
In this paper the author analyzes the factors and causes of the increase in prison population in Chile between 2000 and 2009. It is stated that the factors that cause a rise in prison population are attributable to an increased inflow of people into the criminal system, to a longer incarceration of prisoners, and, to a lack of real mechanisms of prison reduction. In turn, the causes that are likely to originate these factors are analyzed, such as the Criminal Procedure Reform and everything it brought from the perspective of a new system of criminal justice, the punitive criminal justice that favor incarceration, and a marked reduction in legal benefits known as alternatives to prison.
This essay forms the basis of a presentation at Balliol College, Oxford University, at the International Symposium on Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Problem-Solving Justice. Although therapeutic jurisprudence( TJ) actually originated outside the context of problem-solving courts, TJ in practice remains closely associated with such courts, probably because their structure invites the use of a style of judging endorsed by the TJ literature. Recently, however, for economic and other reasons, there has been an interest in “mainstreaming” TJ and related approaches to judging. For that to occur, we need to examine the governing “legal landscapes” (legal rules and legal procedures) in mainstream criminal courts to see how “TJ-friendly “– or unfriendly — they may be. We may conceptualize the principles of TJ judging as a kind of “liquid,” and can look at the operative legal structures as “bottles,” An analysis of varying legal provisions will indicate how much of the TJ liquid can be poured into the assorted bottles. This examination can lead to proposing a TJ “code” of proposed criminal processes, together with a commentary explaining how, under the given suggested structures, the law can be administered to maximize the use of TJ judging principles. In the present essay, I concentrate mostly (but not exclusively) on US law, although the coverage is quite spotty, and a state-by-state TJ look at relevant criminal processes is very much in order. Moreover, as TJ is now quite international in scope, my hope is that the exercise might be undertaken as well in other jurisdictions, and that the result may be the creation of a rich body of TJ thinking in a comparative law context.
This article analyzes data derived from the first detailed long-term follow-up of a sample of serious adolescent female delinquents and similarly situated males. Neither marital attachment nor job stability, factors frequently associated with male desistance from crime, were strongly related to female or male desistance. A symbolic-interactionist perspective on desistance is developed as a counterpoint to Sampson and Laub's theory of informal social control, and life history narratives are used to illustrate the perspective. This cognitive theory is generally compatible with a control approach but (a) adds specificity regarding underlying change mechanisms, (b) explains some negative cases, and (c) fits well with life course challenges facing contemporary serious female (and more provisionally male) offenders.
Thirty-five in-depth, face-to-face interviews were carried out with sentenced male prisoners shortly before their release from prison. All but two of them had been incarcerated on at least one prior occasion, and had served an average of five previous prison sentences. A quarter of them had been flagged by the prison staff as being at risk for suicide or self-harm. The study was designed in partnership with the users' involvement group of the Revolving Doors Agency, a voluntary sector organization that provides services to ex-offenders with mental health problems. Although the principal objective in setting up the study was to explore the factors that influence help-seeking for mental distress, the respondents talked more generally about their problems, concerns, and expectations on leaving prison. Fifty-four percent of them were re-interviewed four to six weeks following their discharge date. While most faced multiple social problems, a dominant theme in their accounts was positive thinking about imprisonment combined with fatalism (or defensive-pessimism) about coping with obstacles such as homelessness or substance addictions, and distrust of “helping” professionals. This article discusses the contribution of such thinking patterns to the phenomenon of “revolving door” prison sentences.
It is now widely acknowledged that progression from persistent offending to desistance from crime is the outcome of a complex interaction between subjective/ agency factors and social/environmental factors. A methodological challenge for desistance researchers is to unravel the differential impacts of these internal and external factors and the sequence in which they come into play. Towards this, the present investigation draws on a prospective study of 130 male property offenders, interviewed in the 1990s (the Oxford Recidivism Study), and followed up 10 years later. The analysis supports a `subjective—social model' in which subjective states measured before release have a direct effect on recidivism as well as indirect effects through their impact on social circumstances experienced after release from prison.
This article considers whether employment is a "turning point" in the lives of criminal offenders. We present a brief overview of research on the relationship between work and crime. Our review suggests that work programs appear to be more effective for adult offenders than for adolescents and young adults. The quality of employment also appears to be important for reducing recidivism, although it is difficult to make definitive causal inferences based on observational evidence from existing studies. Finally, we find that work-based programs can reduce arrest rates for ex- addicts, but appear to be less effective in reducing future substance use. We conclude with several unanswered questions and directions for future research.
Based on the Liverpool Desistance Study, this book compares and contrasts the stories of ex-convicts who are actively involved in criminal behavior with those who are desisting from crime and drug use. Extensive excerpts from the study reveal two types of personal narratives: a "condemnation" script favored by active offenders and a "generative" script favored by desisters. The way that these scripts are constructed and the manner in which they are used is then examined in light of contemporary criminological and psychological thought. The results suggests that success in reform depends on providing rehabilitative opportunities that reinforce the generative script. This study reveals a constructive new direction for offender rehabilitation efforts and will appeal to a wide range of readers from psychologists and criminologists to legislators, administrators, substance abuse counselors, and offenders themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In 2002, over 600,000 individuals left state and federal prisons, four times as many as were released in 1975. However, according to a national study, within 3 years, almost 7 in 10 will have been rearrested and half will be back in prison, either for a new crime or for violating conditions of their release. Clearly, an indi-vidual's transition from prison back into a home and into a community is difficult, and avoiding crime can be the least of his or her problems. Understanding these path-ways and the reasons for and the dimensions of an individual's success or failure is the focus of recent scholarly attention to the problem of "prisoner reentry," the pro-cess of leaving prison and returning to free society. However, most of the existing research on prisoners' lives after release focuses solely on recidivism and ignores the reality that recidivism is directly affected by postprison reintegration and adjustment, which, in turn, depends on four sets of factors: personal and situational characteris-tics, including the individual's social environment of peers, family, community, and state-level policies. Moreover, individual transitions from prison to community are, we suggest, best understood in a longitudinal framework, taking into account an indi-vidual's circumstances before incarceration, experiences during incarceration, and the period after release—both the immediate experience and long-term situational circum-stances. This review summarizes what we know about the four specified dimensions and how they affect an individual's transition from prison to community. The review concludes with a call to the research community for interdisciplinary, multilevel, lon-gitudinal studies of the processes of reintegration for former prisoners. Such research may illuminate many dimensions of social life, including the effects of recent social policies.
This article is the printed version of a lecture given at the Cooley Law School as part of a symposium on disability law. Therapeutic jurisprudence is an interdisciplinary perspective that looks at the law itself as a potential therapeutic agent. It focuses on the impact of the law on emotional life and psychological well-being, The law consists of the law in action, and not merely the law on the books, and law is defined to include legal rules, legal procedures, and the roles of legal actors. One thrust of therapeutic jurisprudence is law reform, but another important dimension is in exploring ways in which the existing law may be more therapeutically applied. The latter aspect of therapeutic jurisprudence enables psychological insights to be effectively employed in judging and in the day-to-day practice of the law. The article provides examples of therapeutic jurisprudence, both in its law reform and in its practice dimension, and illustrates how promising psychological literature may be creatively imported into the law and the legal system.
One consequence of the tremendous growth in the number of persons under supervision of the criminal justice system, whether incarcerated, on parole, or on probation, is the effect of this criminal history on finding and keeping a job. Ex-offenders, especially those recently released from prison, face substantial barriers to many types of legal employment; nonetheless, stable employment is one of the best predictors of post-release success. Thus, policy-makers concerned about high recidivism rates face an obvious need to improve the employment prospects of ex-offenders. Over the last 25 years, many programs that were designed to increase employment (and, by so doing, reduce recidivism) among ex-offenders have been implemented and evaluated. [Wilson, D. B., Gallagher, C. A., Coggeshall, M. B. & MacKenzie, D. L. (1999). Corrections Management Quarterly 3(4), 8–18; Wilson, D. B., Gallagher, C. A. & MacKenzie, D. L. (2000). Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 37(4), 347–368] conducted a quantitative synthesis and meta-analysis of 33 evaluations of educational, vocational, and work programs for persons in correctional facilities. To date, however, the evaluation literature on employment programs for those with a criminal record who are not in custody has not been systematically reviewed. This paper presents the results of a quantitative meta-analysis of eight random assignment studies of such programs, using the Campbell Collaboration methodology. The results indicate that this group of community employment programs for ex-offenders did not reduce recidivism; however, the experimental design research on this question is small and does not include some of the promising community employment programs that have emerged in the last decade.
Drawing on interview data from three countries (Australia, United States and England), this article examines setbacks and
recovery in desistance from crime. We show that giving up crime is a fragile project and that the implications of fragility
in desistance are rarely integrated into pre- and post-release support options. To shine a light on the ‘phenomenological
foreground’ of this fragility, we use Matza’s concepts of desperation and infraction and analyse how and why would-be desisters come unstuck. We find that derailment in the desistance process (frequently articulated
by interviewees as ‘fuck it’ moments) rarely signifies the desire to reoffend and more often equates to the loss of the practical
and emotional capacity to desist from crime.
This article outlines the striking changes that have occurred in parole release and supervision over the last two and a half decades. It reveals that most of the prisoners are now released "mandatorily," where they don't have to discretionally appear in front of a parole board to set their release dates. It then shows how parole boards make these decisions, as well as the implications of these decisions for parole agents. Finally, the article discusses the culture of supervision and public safety.
Moving away from criminal behaviour can be fraught with difficulties. Often it can involve leaving behind old habits, customs, and even friends, while at the same time adopting a new way of life. How do individuals go about making a decision to give up crime? How do they plan to sustain this decision? And in what ways does probation help? This book explores these questions. Based on in-depth interviews with a group of men under probation supervision, Sam King investigates the factors associated with making a decision to desist from crime. The book examines strategies for desistance, and explores the factors that individuals consider when they are thinking about how they will desist. In doing so, the book sheds new light on existing understandings of desistance from crime and helps to develop our understandings of the role that individuals play in constructing their own desistance journeys. This book also highlights the role of probation in this process, offering a timely and critical review of the nature of probation under the New Labour government in the UK between 1997-2010. The findings indicate that we should allow Probation Officers greater autonomy and discretion within their roles, and that we should free them from the bureaucracy of risk assessment and targets. Moreover, the book warns against the potential fragmentation of community supervision. As such, the book will be of interest to criminology students, researchers, academics, policymakers and practitioners, particularly those who work with ex-offenders in the community.
There is a significant conceptual divide between criminological theories that treat offenders as rational agents who freely choose their actions and those that portray offenders as individuals whose behaviour is determined by external forces. Recently, research into desistance from crime has produced a more complex and nuanced account of crime causation which acknowledges the interplay between agency and structure. Yet, while the concept of agency is frequently invoked in contemporary discourse, the variety of definitions and measures employed by researchers makes it difficult to establish a clear and consistent picture of its role. This article attempts to address this deficit by evaluating the contributions of agency-centred theories of desistance. An integrated framework, which aims to consolidate existing knowledge about agency and provide additional insights into its role in desistance, is then proposed.
This book analyzes newly collected data on crime and social development up to age 70 for 500 men who were remanded to reform school in the 1940s. Born in Boston in the late 1920s and early 1930s, these men were the subjects of the classic study Unraveling Juvenile Delinquency by Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck (1950). Updating their lives at the close of the twentieth century, and connecting their adult experiences to childhood, this book is arguably the longest longitudinal study of age, crime, and the life course to date. John Laub and Robert Sampson's long-term data, combined with in-depth interviews, defy the conventional wisdom that links individual traits such as poor verbal skills, limited self-control, and difficult temperament to long-term trajectories of offending. The authors reject the idea of categorizing offenders to reveal etiologies of offending--rather, they connect variability in behavior to social context. They find that men who desisted from crime were rooted in structural routines and had strong social ties to family and community.By uniting life-history narratives with rigorous data analysis, the authors shed new light on long-term trajectories of crime and current policies of crime control.
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Despite increasing interest in understanding patterns of criminal behavior over the life course and, especially, desistance from crime, evidence about the predictors of these experiences has been derived only from samples of male offenders. We evaluate whether there are gender differences in the predictors of both self-reported illegal earnings and arrest among samples of recently released male and female offenders. Our analysis of gender differences illustrates how both the behavior of the offender and the behavior of law shape our understanding of the transition out of crime. We analyze event history data from a large-scale social experiment that provided employment to male and female offenders. The results indicate that (1) gender differences in the predictors of desistance largely depend on the domain of behavior under consideration; (2) indicators of normative status, as opposed to the perceived risks of crime or age-graded informal controls, are particularly important determinants of women's risks of rearrest.
Within the human life-span, the decade of the 20s (age 20—29) is known to manifest the fastest deceleration of offending. This article reports findings concerning the social and moral values of a sample of recidivist offenders at the start of this age-range. Most reported surprisingly conformist values, for example with regard to future aspirations (employment, housing, etc.) and to the importance of staying within legal boundaries. Nevertheless, longitudinal data showed that these conformist values often did not prevent some continued offending (though within the sample, taking steps towards desistance was associated with more conformist values). This dissonance between values and behaviour was not explained by neutralizations, but rather (1) by complex processes of maturation, in which intentions to ‘go straight’ co-exist with lapses into learned (habitual) criminal responses; and (2) by the spontaneous character of much offending, with for example invitations to offend by criminal friends being common. Thus, those seriously wishing to desist (to bring their behaviour into line with their social values) face an obstacle-strewn process of lifestyle change, though one often supported by partners and relatives. To assist lifestyle change, many would-be desisters adopt tactics of ‘diachronic self-control’, attempting to avoid future situations of criminal temptation. If the criminal justice system wishes to assist desistance among this age-group, it is vital that these complex processes are understood and supported.
This article provides a discussion of human agency, conceptualized as a transformative aspect of desistance from crime. It is argued here that existing conceptualizations of agency are vague or underexplored, and that a framework based upon the work of Emirbayer and Mische (1998) offers a more comprehensive overview of the manner in which individuals approach desistance. This follows other recent work (for example, Paternoster and Bushway, 2009), in arguing that desistance involves the envisioning of an alternative future identity, and that this is one aspect of agency in the desistance process. However, it is argued here that the deployment of such agency is conditioned by social context and that this delimits the range of future possibilities available. This is illustrated with two cases as examples from recent research in this area.
One of Sampson and Laub's central findings from their analysis of the Gluecks' data was that reductions in adult criminal behavior were associated with stable employment. In support of their theory of informal social control, they maintained that employment builds social capital that, in turn, bonds young adults to social institutions. Using data from the National Youth Survey we examine the effects of associating with prosocial coworkers on changing delinquent peer networks and on criminal behavior and drug use. The results demonstrate that prosocial coworkers disrupt previously established delinquent peer networks and are associated with reductions in adult criminal behavior.
Recent correctional reforms have ameliorated the deprivations of prison and indirectly have caused states to toughen probation because many offenders must be diverted from incarceration to meet court-defined limits on prison crowding. These changes raise the possibility that offenders increasingly may view prison as easier or less punitive than probation. Using interview data from newly incarcerated Texas offenders, this analysis examines the extent to which offenders prefer incarceration when presented with choices between paired prison and probation sentences. Though a number of demographic and experiential variables are examined, multivariate analysis reveals that being African-American is the strongest predictor of a preference for prison. Implications of these results are discussed.
This article aims (1) to analytically disaggregate agency into its several component elements (though these are interrelated empirically), (2) to demonstrate the ways in which these agentic dimensions inter-penetrate with forms of structure, and (3) to point out the implications of such a conception of agency for empirical research. The authors conceptualize agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its "iterational" or habitual aspect) but also oriented toward the future (as a "projective" capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a "practical-evaluative" capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment).
Although “social support” is present as a theme in many criminological writings, it has not been identified explicitly as a concept capable of organizing theory and research in criminology. Drawing on existing criminological and related writings, this address derives a series of propositions that form the foundation, in a preliminary way, for the “social support paradigm” of the study of crime and control. The overriding contention is that whether social support is delivered through government social programs, communities, social networks, families, interpersonal relations, or agents of the criminal justice system, it reduces criminal involvement. Further, I contend that insofar as the social support paradigm proves to be “Good Criminology”—establishing that nonsupportive policies and conditions are criminogenic—it can provide grounds for creating a more supportive, “Good Society.”
This article is excerpted from Marta Nelson, Perry Deess, and Charlotte Allen's longer article of the same name published by the Vera Institute of Justice in 1999. The report is an account, issue by issue, of what the authors learned from participants about life in the first thirty days after getting out of prison or jail. Those first days and weeks appear to be critical, with arrest rates for released prisoners highest soon after release and declining over time. The study showed that the first month is not only a period of difficulties but also a period of opportunities to get people started on the path to employment, abstinence from drugs, good family relations, and crime-free living.
Sampson and Laub (1993) provided a major contribution to the study of criminal careers by linking criminal behavior to life-course transitions, such as marriage, employment, and entry into the military. To interpret their findings, these investigators relied exclusively on control theory. In a sharp departure from that position, this study offers evidence that life-course transitions affect criminal behavior by altering relations with delinquent peers. Focusing on marriage, the analysis shows that the transition to marriage is followed by a dramatic decline in time spent with friends as well as reduced exposure to delinquent peers, and that these factors largely explain the association between marital status and delinquent behavior. The findings suggest that changing patterns of peer relations over the life course are essential for understanding criminal life-course trajectories.
This article argues that desistance research should provoke a reconsideration of the essential character of interventions with adults involved in offending behaviour. It begins by discussing broad accounts of the characteristics of late-modern penal systems as the background to an exploration of current developments in probation policy and practice. In particular, the discussion develops some contrasts between ‘welfarist rehabilitation’ and ‘correctional treatment’ as competing (but inadequate) paradigms for probation practice. In the context of these contrasts, the situation of criminal justice social work in post-devolution Scotland receives particular attention. Possible implications for practice of some important desistance studies are then developed, in order to stimulate discussion and debate about the extent to which desistance research might challenge the correctionalism that is emerging in probation policy and practice in the UK. In the conclusion, bearing in mind proposed organisational changes on both sides of the border that might tend towards advancing correctionalism, the prospects for more constructive developments in Scotland are considered in the light of emerging evidence about the views of frontline workers and in the light of existing ‘official’ objectives for criminal justice social work.
This paper explores the process of exiting from criminal careers through unstructured interviews with twenty nonprofessional property offenders. he findings suggest that (I) exiting is motivated by the deterrent force of imprisonment and the offender's desire to “settle down”; (2) success in exiting revolves around the establishment of a social bond to the conventional world. In general, these findings support social control as a theory of criminal behavior.
Recomendaciones para una Nueva Política Penitenciaria
- Consejo De
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