Uggen,
Christopher and Candace Kruttschnitt. 1998. “Crime in the Breaking: Gender Differences in
Desistance.” Law and Society Review
32:401-28.
Reprinted in The Termination of Criminal Careers,
edited by Stephen Farrall. 2000. International Library of Criminology and
Criminal Justice,
ABSTRACT
Despite
increasing interest in understanding patterns of criminal behavior over the
life course and, especially, desistance from crime, evidence about the
predictors of these experiences is derived only from samples of male offenders.
We evaluate whether there are gender differences in the predictors of both
self-reported illegal earnings and arrest among samples of recently released
male and female offenders. In so doing, we also seek to determine whether the
traditional motivational models of desistance or Black’s (1976) theory of law
provide the best framework for predicting and explaining the transition out of
crime. Event history data from a large-scale social experiment that provided
employment to male and female offenders is used to address these issues. The
findings are complex but indicate that (1) gender differences in the predictors
of desistance are largely dependent upon the domain of behavior under
consideration; and, (2) indicators of normative status, as opposed to the
perceived risks of crime or age-graded informal controls, are particularly
important determinants of women’s risks of rearrest.