Introduction

Identity transition is integral to our comprehension of desistance from crime at both a definitional and theoretical level. As the phenomena whereby individuals who have been actively engaged in crime reduce or curtail their offending behaviour it involves, at its most basic, a binary shift from the status of one identity, ‘an offender’, to that of another identity, that of ‘non-offender’. This conceptualisation, albeit crude and simplistic, conveys the essence of what desistance is and is understood to mean. The processes involved in both desistance and identity transitions are, of course, much more complicated than this. Determining the identification of one's own identity and the labelling of others’ identities is a subjective, as opposed to an objective, consideration. This subjectivity has implications for the measurement of desistance and its operationalisation that raises questions of typology and timing: for example, ‘under what circumstances can someone be considered a “desister” or to have successfully desisted?’; ‘when does an offender become a “non”-offender?’; ‘is the identity of nonoffender acquired easily or is it subsumed under the more problematic identity of ex-offender?’ (Farrall and Calverley, 2006; Maruna, 2001; Kazemian, 2007).

As well as comprising a description of what desistance entails, by bridging both the social and the personal, identity also provides an explanatory framework for how desistance takes place. Making a (or the) transition from offending to non-offending identity is one of the key processes associated with desistance. Research has identified that this can involve a number of psychological and psycho-social processes that take place within the ‘internal’ world of the desister in relation to events outside. For example, faced with the dilemma of incoherency in their narrative identity and reconciling their past lives as active offenders with their future desires to avoid offending, successful desisters in Maruna's (2001) sample underwent a process of re-biographing where they rewrote the story of their lives using a ‘redemption script’ that cast themselves as essentially good people. Others have framed this transition to a desisting identity as being a slowly unfolding and ordered process of events. Vaughan (2006) theorises that desisters engage in an ‘internal conversation’ during which they weigh up the pros and cons of desisting as they go through separate phases of discernment, deliberation and dedication.