Giving maturity a second look in the context of desistance across the adolescence-adulthood transition
Life course criminology research on desistance has not provided practitioners with much direction about effective areas of focus for intervention strategies, especially during adolescence and emerging adulthood. This gap can be addressed by considering how maturation, an important part of this developmental period, influences desistance. The current study focused on males from the Pathways to Desistance Study who were aged 16 or 17 at baseline (n = 704). Fixed-effects models showed that within-individual increases in psychosocial and identity measures of maturation were associated with within-individual decreases in a person’s self-reported level of offending. The findings highlight the value of intervention and treatment strategies that improve maturation.