Desistance

In criminology, desistance is the process by which criminal offending declines and eventually stops for someone who was previously active in crime. A widely cited 2001 synthesis by John H. Laub and Robert J. Sampson distinguished desistance, the underlying causal process, from termination, the point at which offending actually ends, and identified good marriages, stable employment, transformation of identity and aging as recurring correlates across studies. Their life course perspective treats stopping crime as a gradual outcome of changing social bonds and turning points in adulthood rather than a single decision.