Abstract

Studies of why people stop offending have been one of the considerable growth areas of criminology and life-course studies since the early-1990s. Initially the research focused on assessing the extent to which people who had offending did cease offending. Having established this, the field then sought to account for why and how they ceased. Of late, a new question has come to the fore: what sort of lifestyles develop for people after they have desisted? This question, in some respects, begs another about the legitimacy of asking or encouraging people to desist and, by implication, the promotion of academic studies which conceive of and represent desistance as a goal in and of itself. This paper’s contribution to these debates is to assess the lives of people not as they desist or in the immediate aftermath of their desisting, but several years after they have stopped offending. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative sample of British people born in 1970, this paper finds that, by their early 40s, the lifestyles of people who have desisted start to differ from those of people who have persisted in offending, and have started to take on some of the characteristics of non-offenders’ lifestyles.