People with convictions often face financial challenges, which hinder desistance from crime as they have few legal opportunities to address their financial burdens. In some countries, those severely insolvent can apply for 'debt settlement' through Enforcement Authorities. This study explores whether such settlements are crime-preventative for people with conviction histories. Analyzing Swedish administrative data and a sample of 1,621 previously convicted applicants in 2016-17, we match and compare reconviction rates between approved and declined cases. Approved cases show much lower reconviction rates, but this effect diminishes rapidly, virtually disappearing within six months. These findings prompt a discussion of the helpfulness of debt settlements for people wanting to desist from crime. Implications for future research, policy, and practice are discussed.

This book provides a nuanced, critical analysis of desistance from crime, particularly through the lens of women’s experiences. It develops desistance theory by interrogating the concept of normalcy, highlighting how normative societal expectations cause harms on desistance journeys. Through this lens, the book uncovers tensions between desistance as a journey towards societal (re)integration and the resistance desisters experience when encountering state institutions and social norms. Being no longer part of the old life, and not yet part of the new, desisters face both familiar and unfamiliar harms. A key conceptual contribution is the book’s critique of normalcy as both an aspirational and oppressive goal. The work illustrates how the pursuit of mainstream inclusion can expose desisters to both new and continuous harms. These include surveillance and stigma, social and literal death, gendered violence, and economic precarity. By engaging with feminist and temporal criminological theories, the book sheds light on how desisters’ experiences reveal the dark side of normalcy, calling into question whether its pursuit is wholly desirable. With its focus on the intersections of gender, stigma, and social control, this work advances academic debates on desistance, proposing a rethinking of how criminal justice systems and support frameworks engage with those transitioning out of criminalized lifestyles. It will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, desistance, gender studies, recovery from addiction, and to practitioners and policy-makers in these fields.

Focusing on how to deal with relapses when trying to desist from crime, this article utilises findings from a qualitative and prospective interview study to illustrate what it means to desist. Ten women’s desistance journeys have been studied longitudinally since 2015. Over these years, the women have encountered setbacks and relapses, yet somehow persevered on their path towards a different ‘normal’ life, free from crime, condemnation and marginalisation. Their struggle highlights the need for persistence to sustain desistance from crime. Persistence and desistance are generally conceptualised as each other’s counterparts within life-course criminology, yet putting persistence at the heart of desistance journeys can deepen our understanding of the process involved.

While Sweden is on the criminological map as an example of suggested exceptionalism in punishment, the country’s exceptionally punitive drug policy is less known. Sweden has one of the harshest drug policies in the globalised north; for example, drug use itself is criminalised. This punitive turn is strikingly illustrated in a 1991 governmental report stating that ‘it shall be difficult to be a drug misuser. The more difficult we make their lives, the more clear the other alternatives, that is a drug-free life, will appear’ (quoted in Lenke, L. and Olsson, B. (2002) ‘Swedish drug policy in the twenty-first century: A policy model going astray’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 582(1), pp. 64–79, 65). Criminalised women’s lifestyles are often conflated with drug use, and so their life stories are bound up with the effects of these policies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with women on the route out of crime, this chapter explores women’s experiences with state control of their drug use, paying particular attention to how a culture of intervention influences their desistance processes. Findings include themes of cohesive control, denied desistance identity, and distrust in and disengagement with authorities. The chapter shows that while the Swedish approach has undoubtedly been successful in making it difficult to be a drug misuser, it likewise makes it difficult to be a successful desister.

Debt problems are ubiquitous among people with convictions, yet debts’ implications for processes of desistance from crime remain underexplored. Existing research has primarily focused on ‘punishment debt’. Building on that, this longitudinal study of women in Sweden takes a holistic approach to debts in desistance. Debts are potentially criminogenic forces restricting agency in desistance. However, becoming debt-free and creditworthy is a potent way of approaching mainstream society from a position as ‘excluded other’. Importantly, while some debts are viewed as ‘normal’ and required to live out normative dreams of material prosperity, desisters perceived their debts as the ‘wrong’ type in relation to their view of normalcy. This emphasizes the long road toward the mainstream that desistance processes involve. 

This article presents findings from a longitudinal interview study following the desistance processes of 10 women. While desistance theory primarily focuses on the processual movement away from crime, this article pays close attention to what desisters strive to desist into. The repeated in-depth interviews reveal a diverse range of future aspirations among desisters, and the analysis unravels gendered, class-, and age-graded aspects of such aspirations. As a result of these findings, the article problematizes parts of previous research both empirically and theoretically, and allows for a development of the understanding of desistance processes.

Although desistance is increasingly recognized as a series of complex processes by which individuals transform from offenders into nonoffenders, few desistance scholars have studied this process in depth. In recent years, however, some have begun to explore how desistance is a process rife with setbacks and struggles. Through an analysis of repeated in-depth interviews with ten desisting women, in this study, we have found such struggles to be unsettling and outright frightening. Examples of this were prevalent throughout the women's narratives. The results of our analysis show how frightening aspects of desistance processes stem from making an unfamiliar, normative lifestyle familiar, while unfamiliarizing oneself with a familiar, deviant lifestyle. As such, desistance processes can be conceptualized as uncanny, that is, as pertaining to the frightening and uncertain. Although uncanniness is not a theoretical framework one tends to find in desistance research, it has the potential to develop the understanding of the struggles, fears, and anxieties of desistance processes. Through our analysis, we engage with how uncanniness can nuance established concepts in desistance research. Implications for theory as well as for criminal justice practice are discussed.

Maintaining desistance is about struggling. It is about leaving a destructive and unwanted way of life behind in pursuit of something else, something unknown, something 'normal'. When people who have lived their entire life at the margin of society − in poverty, drug use, criminalisation and condemnation − set out to change their lives, what does that mean? Individual reform is not an easy task for anyone, and perhaps even less so for people involved in criminalised lifestyles. Yet, this is at the core of current understandings in criminology and the criminal justice system. But how do people involved with the criminal justice system go about such reform? And how do individual resources and social structure shape the road to inclusion and 'normality'?

This book is the culmination of a research project covering women’s desistance from crime. The overarching question that the research project grapples with is ‘What is important in the lives of criminalised women as they set out to change their ways of living and acting?’ This broad focus thus includes aspects that may facilitate or hinder desistance; what helps, what impedes, and why?

The results and discussions draw on repeated in-depth interviews with ten women in Sweden. The women had spent the majority of their lives in a position as 'other', segregated and excluded from conventional society. For decades, the women were engaged in criminalised lifestyles circulating around common street crime. At the start of the project, these ten women had just set out on a journey towards a new life, striving to leave crime, drugs, exclusion and condemnation behind. The project's longitudinal design allowed me to take part in the women's desistance journeys, and study the processes involved.

Findings from the project have been published as articles in scientific journals. This book situates these findings, and discusses the implications of the project as a whole: its methodological, empirical and theoretical contributions. Taken together, the results elucidate both expectations and inhibitions associated with desistance; hopes, outlooks, achievements, as well as barriers or hinders faced along the way. These different findings emphasise the uncertainties involved in 'going straight' or maintaining desistance, in ways that adds nuance to and critically furthers contemporary understandings in the research field and criminal justice practice.

The prospective and exploratory approach of this project thus adds to current knowledge by elucidating experiences of structural barriers, relational uncertainties, personal doubt, hope, and aspirations involved in ongoing desistance processes. Looking forward, it is important for future research and criminal justice practice to acknowledge desistance as complex processes. Desistance journeys are subject to relapse and fraught with emotions, hinders, setbacks but also hope and aspirations that all must be taken into consideration if society is to understand and better support people attempting such reform.