When ‘once a criminal’ does not mean ‘always a criminal’: Desistance process of Quebecer’s offenders
The study of criminal careers has made it possible, up until now, to identify the mechanisms that lead a person to commit crimes. However, although it is well documented that the vast majority of offenders will one day cease their criminal activities (reference to the crime-curve), only in recent years have scholars focused on the last phase of these criminal careers: the moment at which they end. While desistance processes have been studied for probationers and prisoners, little is known about the desistance process of offenders on conditional sentence. At the present time, there are three main theories of desistance in the literature on which no consensus has been reached. Highlighting the limitations of these theories, this paper offers a new conceptual angle with which to understand desistance from crime. By applying this new conceptual framework to qualitative data collected from 29 offenders on conditional sentence in Quebec, the paper brings to light three separate processes (the convert, the repentant and the rescued) that contribute to stopping criminal behavior.