Abstract
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.
Introduction
In recent years, processes of desistance from crime have seen an increased interest in research (Bersani & Doherty, 2018; Broidy & Cauffman, 2017). As the term suggests, the theoretical focus is on desistance from crime. Thus, as with criminology in general, the primary concern is with criminal activities and, in this case, past criminal activities. However, the concept of desistance is also future oriented, and questions of how as well as why people desist from crime have been addressed within this body of research (Bersani & Doherty, 2018). Aiming to develop the existing knowledge, the present article is dedicated to the future-oriented question of what desisters want for their future, and what they believe that they are desisting into. What aspirations do desisters hold for their futures as they begin their journeys toward a changed lifestyle? How do desisters go about pursuing these aspirations? And how do structural forces, personal resources, and life chances impact this pursuit? By paying close attention to the future aspirations of 10 desisting women as they set out on their desistance journeys, the aim of this study is to contribute to a deepened understanding of the processes of desistance.
Much of contemporary desistance research seeks to identify and understand mechanisms that can facilitate individuals’ move away from criminal lifestyles (Bersani & Doherty, 2018; Rodermond, Kruttschnitt, Slotboom, & Bijleveld, 2016). Such studies typically emphasize the importance of stable housing, employment, pro-social contacts, and health for successful and sustained desistance from crime. For women specifically, motherhood has been emphasized in numerous studies as an important facilitator of desistance (Rodermond et al., 2016). Taken together, the various factors highlighted as important to desisters pursuing a changed lifestyle can be construed as being in line with what is important for anyone to pass as normal and included in mainstream society. However, people engaged in criminalized lifestyles rarely have stable housing, employment, pro-social contacts, or beneficial health factors ready at hand, making it quite clear from previous research that a lot needs to ensue as people embark upon a desistance journey (Bottoms & Shapland, 2011; Harris, 2011). Previous experiences, together with the social structure in which people live out their lives, construct the possibilities and limitations for their future aspirations.
In the present article, social position, with a specific focus on how gender and age norms coalesce with poverty, will guide the analysis to develop the understanding of future aspirations and strivings among desisters. Based on repeated in-depth interviews with 10 women striving to desist from crime, the article reveals how future aspirations differ quite extensively within the studied group. As a result, the findings problematize parts of previous research both empirically and theoretically, and allow for a development of the understanding of desistance processes.
Future Aspirations Among Desisters
Although rarely in focus for analysis, some (mostly qualitative) research has included the question of what desisting individuals want for their future. While exceptions do exist, such research has primarily been conducted on men or on mixed samples with a majority of men (Bersani & Doherty, 2018; Rodermond et al., 2016). In addition, studies have often targeted young people and their transition into adulthood. The present study draws on such research, but the design is somewhat different, as it is based on repeated interviews with women of various ages (spanning from 23 to 53 years at the first interview). In so doing, the present study is well positioned to investigate how contexts and situatedness influence desisters’ future aspirations and possibilities for change.
Exploring the role of emotions in desistance, Farrall and colleagues (Farrall & Calverley, 2006; Farrall, Hunter, Sharpe, & Calverley, 2014) observed that hope characterized the early stages of desistance, where early stages refers to the initial phase of any desistance journey. At this stage, hopes for the future were quite formless and vague, and were either focused on what the desisters wished not to do in the future (i.e., not to offend, not to let family down, etc.), or entailed notions of “wanting to try,” or to “be a really good person” in the future. Farrall and colleagues emphasize that within the early stages of desistance, aspirations in the form of goals have not yet been fully identified, let alone accomplished. With time, the vague hopes and dreams became much more concrete. As such, aspirations for the future seem to evolve out of hope or dreams and take shape as desistance progresses (Farrall & Calverley, 2006; Farrall et al., 2014).
This notion of vagueness in future aspirations at the early stages of desistance can be developed further via results from other longitudinal studies. In the Sheffield Desistance Study, 113 recidivist men in their early 20s are asked what kind of person they would like to be in 5 years’ time. The study highlights “modest and conventional” aspirations, and the responses to the question entailed “Confident. Hardworking. Trustworthy. A good person to get on with” (Bottoms & Shapland, 2011, p. 67). For Bottoms and Shapland (2011), this reads as significant normative links to mainstream society, and, as such, it serves to show that the hopes and dreams of convicted offenders are not essentially different from the noncriminalized population. However, Bottoms and Shapland (2011) also interpret this as a “dream of something much better” (p. 67), which, I argue, taken together, serves to manifest the discrepancy between the modest and conventional aspiration and the social position of people engaged in desistance processes. Furthering the notion of conformist values among desisters, a comparative study of people in transition from adolescence to adulthood shows how young desisters in both Japan and Scotland emphasize a desire for normality as a driving mechanism in desistance (Barry, 2017). Both groups shared a will to cease offending to take responsibilities for children, partners, or parents, and to pursue acceptance and integration into family and friendship networks as well as society at large.
Moreover, the importance of responsibilities for family members and children has been discussed in studies focused on adult women desisters especially. For example, Leverentz (2014) shows how women returning from prison with the assistance of a halfway house were expected by others and themselves to be caregivers within their families. Furthermore, although not in focus for her analysis, Leverentz discusses some future aspirations among the women in her study, including their feelings about pursuing education and work. The halfway house encouraged education, and nearly two thirds of the 49 women indicated that furthering their education was a future goal. Education has worth in itself, with a signal value toward family as well as prospective employers. Furthermore, most of those who hoped to pursue college in the future had concrete career goals in mind (Leverentz, 2014).
Although not focused on hopes and dreams specifically, Lander’s (2015) study of eight drug-using women in Stockholm has relevance for the current study because of its contribution to the understanding of how age and gender norms inform wishes for normality and conventional aspirations. Lander shows that what she termed the older group in her sample, comprising women who had been using amphetamines for between 15 and 30 years, were now highly integrated into a life as outsiders. Moreover, Lander found that despite living outside conventional society, the women still shared the same dreams as women living conventional lives in suburban Sweden, namely, those of doing normative femininity and to pass as normal and respectable. Here, Lander shows how such aspirations are linked to a normative life script entailing a socially constructed conception of a normal way of living and ageing. Life scripts offer normative guidelines for how life should be lived, constituting ordering principles for human existence and action viewed as linear and focused on the future and on progression. Among the most prominent ordering principles are the concepts of a career and heterosexual monogamy, which should be pursued and achieved at the right time in life (see also Halberstam, 2005). Lander also argues that this socially constructed conception is class-coded and built upon a middle-class ideal. Hence, for the women who found themselves integrated into a life as outsiders, their perceptions of their future and their present were contextualized in relation to their past. Their lives were perceived as the other life, askew as it does not follow the straight line of normality and progression proclaimed by the life script. Thus, the women’s embodied otherness manifests how they perceived their past, present, and their future in relation to a normative life script.
Processes of Labeling and Agency in Desistance
As desisters’ aspirations often comprise conventionality and inclusion in society, it is clear that the average desister has a long way to go to achieve her goal. Generally speaking, people with a criminal past tend to find themselves in a disadvantaged social position as they embark on a desistance journey (Bottoms & Shapland, 2011; Harris, 2011). Studies show that this tends to be even more manifest for women than for men (Carlen, 1988; Estrada & Nilsson, 2012; Sheehan, McIvor, & Trotter, 2011). Processes of cumulative disadvantage can snare individuals into persistent offending via decreasing life chances limiting their opportunities for action (Sampson & Laub, 1997). It has been recognized that women suffer harder from labeling due to their double deviance, as women offenders both break the rule of law and defy gender norms proclaiming women to be respectable and morally exemplary (Lander, 2015; Österman & Masson, 2018; Skeggs, 1997). To be labeled as deviant is to be excluded from society, which is why desistance from crime necessitates a processual re-approximation and reintegration into the mainstream (Braithwaite, 1989; Maruna, LeBel, Mitchell, & Naples, 2004).
Thus, to achieve the aspired goal of a normal life, significant changes need to ensue, and not everything falls under what the desister can achieve for herself. Desisters often find themselves obstructed by structural hindrances (such as inability to acquire housing, employment, or pro-social contacts), and such barriers can be devastating to an ongoing desistance process (Nugent & Schinkel, 2016). Furthermore, Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph (2002) propose that the agentic efforts made within a desistance process are acted out in an interplay between subjective and social factors, where structural barriers may render agentic efforts obsolete. Giordano et al.’s (2002) theory of cognitive transformation suggests that on a continuum of advantage and disadvantage, the “real play of agency” is in the middle. For a desister in a relatively advantaged position, the cognitive transformations and agentic moves which are the focal concern for the theory would hardly be necessary. If the desister, instead, acts under “conditions of sufficiently extreme disadvantage” (Giordano et al., 2002, p. 1026), the same acts are unlikely to be adequate to sustain desistance. This has implications for future aspirations of desisters. Given the disadvantaged position of many who are involved in criminalized lifestyles, some find the idea of a major change in lifestyle, which a desistance process necessitates, a daunting endeavor. As such, a disadvantaged social position can work as a demoralizing barrier to desistance (Giordano, Schroeder, & Cernkovich, 2007), and desisters could easily get the sense that what they hope for is out of reach for what they can achieve.
Hope, Dreams, and Future Aspirations
In an attempt to unravel the sequential impacts between subjective/agentic factors (such as identity, self-evaluation, or motivation) and social/environmental factors (i.e., work, family, or peers), LeBel, Burnett, Maruna, and Bushway (2008) found that subjective factors (hope being one of them) may precede life-changing structural events (often conceptualized as turning points or hooks for change, following Laub & Sampson, 2003, and Giordano et al., 2002, respectively). In their study, hope was measured via four questions posed to 126 men convicted for property offences immediately prior to their release from prison (LeBel et al., 2008, p. 142). The questions concerned the men’s prospects of a future life free from crime. The results showed that hope may be a necessary if not a sufficient condition for the success of an individual’s desistance process. The authors suggested that with an adequate sense of hope, the willing desister may both notice and take advantage of potential hooks for change. Furthermore, the authors suggest that hope may shield desisters against reconviction as it may make them better able to weather disappointments or setbacks encountered within their desistance processes, as long as the problems are not excessive (LeBel et al., 2008). Hence, the subjective factor of hope works to influence desistance in both positive and negative directions: a hopeful sense of the future “helps the individual to triumph over problems and make the best of situations” (LeBel et al., 2008, p. 155), while a lack of hope (or “a negative frame of mind”; LeBel et al., 2008, p. 155) may lead to drift and defeatism in response to the same events.
From this discussion of hope specifically, one may (mis)read that as long as the desister wants something bad enough, it will come true. This notion is visible in Paternoster and Bushway’s (2009) influential theorizing of desistance and the feared self, which relies on rational choice theory and individual agency as driving human action. Although their focus is on the initial choice to quit crime and, thus, not on the struggle involved in sustaining desistance that is the focus for this article, the theory has implications for this study. Briefly, Paternoster and Bushway’s identity theory builds on the notion that people have a present, working self, and a future, possible self. This possible self consists of both desires as to what the person wishes or hopes to become (positive possible self) and anxieties over what they fear they might become (the feared self). Prospective desisters then do a cost/benefit calculation as to when to abandon the offending working self and pursue a more conventional one. Paternoster (2017) clarified this particular aspect in a recent article, stressing that “The essence of the identity theory of desistance is that offenders make a decision to quit crime, construct a plan consistent with that intention, and take actions appropriate to that goal” (p. 369). These understandings of personal motivation or agency in desistance have been criticized as being too simplistic, and as relying too heavily upon the individualization thesis (see, for example, Cullen, 2017; Healy, 2013; King, 2012). However, LeBel and colleagues (2008) argue that hope is a “fuzzy concept” (p. 136) and that what they mean to capture in their study is optimism or a desire to change. LeBel et al. (2008) lean on a definition of hope as “the perception of successful agency related to goals” and “the perceived availability of successful pathways related to goals” (p. 136). From this definition, hope is to be understood as different from dreaming or wishing for something to happen. Hope, in this sense, requires both the will and the ways, entailing the desire for a particular outcome and also the perceived ability and means of achieving the outcome.
This conceptualization of hope has a lot in common with the Capabilities Approach as developed by Sen (1985) and Nussbaum (2000), which comprises two key aspects: capabilities and functionings. Functionings are achievements, that is, what a person may value being or doing. Thus, they are subjective, plural, and likely to change over the life course. Examples of functionings are being happy, being in good health, having self-respect, and being accepted by society. However, structural constraints may put up barriers that hinder some people to function in the ways they desire and value (Farrall et al., 2014). A capability, in its turn, is the various functionings that a person actually can achieve. Capabilities, thus, are the real opportunities an individual has to lead the sort of life she wishes to lead, and these opportunities will vary according to a range of factors, such as the individual’s gender, age, personal characteristics (including abilities, talents, and skills), as well as the wider values of the society or culture in which she is situated. It follows that who one can become in the future (a potential functioning) is the outcome of one’s past, how this past is perceived by society, and the wider goals of the society in which one lives. Within desistance theory, this concept can be fruitful to emphasize and explore what an individual is able to do and be and how this is confined by the resources at hand. Just like functionings, capabilities will also evolve over time, and individual agency plays a role in the pursuit of one’s goals, albeit always within the context of a wider set of constraints and opportunities (Farrall et al., 2014).
The literature review at large indicates that previous research employs concepts of hope, dreams, and aspirations quite interchangeably. Drawing on this literature, and agreeing with LeBel et al. (2008) in that hope is a “fuzzy concept” (p. 136), I will in the present study utilize the concepts of dreams along with future aspirations to capture, analyze, and discuss the different strivings among desisters. Dreams are here conceptualized as inner wants and wishes directed toward the future, which can be held without a specific intention to take action to realize them. Future aspirations in relation to such dreams capture the active pursuit of such dreams, via agentic action. In this way, I find that future aspirations, in a fruitful way, capture how more “formless and vague” hopes or dreams are purposefully pursued in agentic efforts that are always acted out in an interplay between the (individual) resources at hand and cultural values of contemporary society. Theorizing future aspirations as such offers a valuable contribution, highlighting how agentic and subjective strivings for a better future are conditioned by social context.
Returning to the distinction between social/structural and subjective/agentic catalysts to change within desistance theory discussed above (LeBel et al., 2008; see also Bersani & Doherty, 2018), voices have been raised advocating the addition of an emotional element, which remains quite overlooked within desistance research (Farrall et al., 2014; Healy, 2013). According to this notion, desistance should not be understood as confined to external social factors or internal cognitive factors, but also as comprising an emotional journey, involving many different and also disparate feelings. Furthermore, it is argued that it is through such emotions that desisters engage in the processes of change that are required for desistance. In addition, research states that it is through emotions that desisters interpret the meaning of the past, make sense of their present, and re-orient their future. As such, emotions should play a part in desistance theory, and how desisters feel about their own progress should matter for desistance journeys (Farrall et al., 2014).
Hope, although a fuzzy concept, is tied to such emotions and could, thus, be important in desistance according to this view. In recent desistance theory, the influence of hope on processes of desistance has primarily been developed via Nugent and Schinkel’s (2016) analysis of the role of hopelessness, and how a feeling of hopelessness may lead to relapse due to its function as a pain of desistance. Nugent and Schinkel (2016) elaborate on three different pains that are involved in the maintenance of desistance: isolation, goal failure, and hopelessness. Isolation is commonly felt among desisters, who often feel the need to cut contact with their old peers as a strategy to stay out of trouble. However, if desisters fail to acquire new social contacts, isolation can become a prolonged, painful, and unwanted state. Furthermore, the pains of goal failure and hopelessness are directly tied to future aspirations. Desisters set goals in their pursuit of a normal life, free from offending. If they fail in their attempts at reaching such goals, or fail to obtain the recognition for their changed behavior, what follows could be the pain of goal failure. When the pains of isolation and goal failure combine, the result could be further pain of hopelessness. Nugent and Schinkel (2016) showed that a lack of hope made life less fulfilling for would-be desisters. In this state of hopelessness, the desistance process is at severe risk of disruption via relapses in offending. Drawing on how repeated goal failure can lead to further pain of hopelessness, I argue, supported by the review of the literature on hope and aspirations among desisters, that successful goal fulfillment theoretically can spark further hope leading to new goals and aspirations to fuel the desistance process in a successful direction (cf. Paternoster & Bushway, 2009).
Method
This article is based on findings from a longitudinal interview study following the desistance processes of 10 women. The women were all in the early stages of desistance when I first interviewed them, meaning that they identified themselves to be currently striving toward a change in lifestyle, leaving crime and (for most) drug use behind. Consistent with Farrall and Calverley (2006, discussed above), early stages is not linked to age, but to time spent on a desistance journey. The recruitment was deliberately broad; I recruited the women from different parts of Sweden, via probation centers, prisons, and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) facilitating reentry. The 10 women were then interviewed repeatedly on a 6-month basis for 2 years, for a total of four interviews per woman.
The project has a broad approach, striving to improve the understanding of women’s desistance, and the interviews were quite lengthy, usually lasting between 2 and 2.5 hr. Thus, they included many themes including family, peer and partner relations, victimization, experiences of police, prison and social services, drug use, and other criminal activities, as well as resource-focused themes such as financial situation, debts, education, employment, and health.
Future aspirations was another theme present already in the first interview, focused on how these tied to the question of why the women wanted to desist. Every subsequent interview followed up on how the women felt they had progressed (or not) toward the aspirations they had shared with me at the first interview. In proximity of completion, I transcribed each interview and coded them into thematic nodes using QSR NVivo 11. In addition, at the fourth and final interview, we revisited this theme of future aspirations, to explore if and how the women’s aspirations had changed as their desistance journeys had progressed. Specifically, I asked them where they wanted to be or what they hoped would have happened 2 years from now. Having discussed their responses, I then changed the phrasing of the question slightly, from hope to belief. As I did, I was careful to articulate that what they believed was to come did not have to differ from what they hoped for; it could be different, but in no way necessarily so. Specifically, I asked them a variation of the question “What do you think will have happened in two years’ time?” These questions and their respective responses constitute a major part of the analysis of this article.
Characteristics of the Women
The 10 women all had different experiences of criminalized lifestyles, and although they all had engaged in common street crime, their offending as well as conviction history varied significantly. One of the women (Maia), although convicted, had never been imprisoned, whereas the woman with the longest aggregated conviction history (Johanna) had spent a total of 13 years in prison. All but one (Nina) had been using and/or abusing narcotic drugs on a regular basis. Most of the women had post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD), five of whom were clinically linked to repeated violent victimization by intimate partners (see Gålnander, 2019 for an in-depth analysis of how such trauma can impact processes of desistance). Age varied greatly within the sample, spanning from 23 to 53 years at the first interview, and will be attached to the first mention of each woman’s pseudonym in the analysis. All women where White and of Swedish or other Scandinavian ethnicity. Three of the women were homeless when I first met them, and only four of the 10 women remained in the same accommodation during the 2 years I followed them. Six of the women held some form of (mostly part-time, sometimes undeclared) employment at the time of the interviews, and five of the women underwent different forms of education.
Future Aspirations: Results and Analysis
Future aspirations was a theme present in every interview. Not knowing what to expect, and having read about how desisters harbored “modest and conventional” (Bottoms & Shapland, 2011, p. 66) wishes for their future, I approached this matter quite carefully. It was soon clear, however, that the women allowed themselves to dream, and that much of their current situation circulated around the active and agentic pursuit of such dreams. Interestingly, future aspirations varied significantly among the women, and the analysis has, therefore, been divided into themes accordingly.
Culturally Conventional Dreams: Interim Goal Fulfillment to Counter Otherness
Much in line with previous research (see, for example, Barry, 2017; Bottoms & Shapland, 2011; Healy, 2013), some of the women in this study shared a dream of normality, that is, of inclusion in conventional society, of belonging, and (re)productivity. All but one of the women came from severely disadvantaged backgrounds. More often than not, the women grew up in broken homes, and poverty, crime and drug use was part of everyday life. Many of the women had spent part of their childhoods and adolescence in foster care and/or incarcerated. Growing up, the women were repeatedly told, by schoolmates, friends, parents, foster parents, the social services, the police, and the prison and probation services, about their otherness and deviation from the norm. As such, the women had never felt normal or included in society to begin with, and even less so as they grew up to become continuously criminalized. For many of the women, their dreams of inclusion and normality were, thus, lifelong dreams, which they now aspired to pursue more intensely as they set out on their desistance journeys.
These “bigger” dreams of inclusion and normality often had a sense of vagueness, as suggested by Farrall and Calverley (2006). However, some of the women continuously broke down bigger dreams into smaller entities, thus producing a road map of interim goals to lead them toward their end goals. This allowed the women to identify possible agentic efforts that could be acted out within the constraints of their otherwise disadvantaged social positions. Kate (age 35) provides a good example of this procedure. Kate’s bigger dream was one of inclusion and acceptance into mainstream society. At our first interview, she felt isolated. Unemployed and having cut off her old network of friends in her pursuit of desistance, Kate’s only regular social contact was with her then 3-year-old daughter, who lived with Kate every other week. About her unwanted isolation during her childless weeks, Kate told me, “I have a hard time when I’m alone, you know? Yeah, most of the time I just shut myself in with Netflix or something.” Kate dreamed of a socially active and productive life, but did not know how to interact with what she termed “normal people.” She was afraid that such interactions would necessitate talk about her past, and she was not willing to do so. At our first interview, Kate said, “I feel like I don’t even know how to be. I mean, what do they talk about, normal people?” Kate’s identity is, thus, constructed in relation to her past. Now finding herself wanting to escape or break with her past, she is increasingly insecure about her present identity. What she has been before has now become an unspeakable void, unpresentable to others. The embodied otherness is manifest in her quote, and has become personified as part of her self to the point of being a barrier to Kate’s attempts to establish pro-social networks. Furthermore, Kate identified that much of her perceived otherness stemmed from her being unemployed. At age 35, the conventional life script implies that a “normal citizen” should be part of the labor force, and Kate did foster future aspirations of employment. She strongly felt that a job would supply her with a steadier identity, and a clearer role as part of society. What she really wanted was to acquire a top position within the social services to change their ways of business for the better. To be able to achieve this, Kate identified education as a necessary step on the way. In addition, when I asked her what she thought was appealing about education, she told me,
As such, education has a value in itself, as a way to build an identity as something else and more normal than just being an other. From this quote, it is evident how Kate’s dream of normality is (re)formulated into a future aspiration via agentic motivation directed at acquiring a socially active and productive life. Here, Kate’s bigger and vaguer dream of normality takes shape as Kate identifies agentic action that can lead her toward her goal. Several of the women clearly identified themselves in relation to their past, and like Kate, they often perceived their past to be in the way of who they wanted to be in the present. Also like Kate, other interviewees identified education as a way to build identity. One interesting example of this can be drawn from Maia (age 52), who at our last interview talked (although in a more fatalistic tone) about how she found herself lacking an identity, and wished to educate herself.
As was the case for all women in this study, Kate did not finish high school as a teenager. Instead, she was returning to do so during the interview period. Norah (age 23) and Doris (age 29) did the same, and all three conceptualized finishing high school as a little step toward a bigger dream. All three held aspirations of higher education once they had the grades required to apply. Norah was the one to phrase this with the most emphasis, as is apparent in this quote from Interview 1:
Here, it is clear how Norah presents a “bigger” dream of attending university to obtain the work she wants. It is equally clear how Norah broke this bigger dream down into smaller steps that would get her there, namely, obtaining the grades she needed from secondary education to attend university. Furthermore, it is important to note that Norah perceives this goal as attainable. Attending university lies within what she can achieve for herself, given her social position.
As discussed in general terms above, Norah came from a severely disadvantaged upbringing, with an absent father and a mother who injected amphetamines in their living room. Throughout Norah’s childhood, her mother was repeatedly victimized by intimate partners, and Norah found herself needing to physically protect her mother. Her onset of habitual drug misuse was with a hit of her mother’s amphetamines, at age 11. A boyfriend introduced her to heroin at age 14, which then became her drug of choice until she began her desistance process at age 23. During our interviews, she returned to school and finished both lower and upper secondary education in less than 2 years, with the clear goal being to undertake further education at the university. At Interview 1, Norah was unclear on which university program she wanted to attend when she had the grades necessary to apply. She was considering either Social Work or Nursing. At Interview 4, she had decided on the latter, and at the time of writing, Norah was enrolled. While she was catching up on her secondary education, Norah also worked part-time as an assistant nurse. She ascribed great meaning to this, as well. Aside from the money it brought, which was definitely important to her, Norah’s part-time work also granted her a sense of belonging, she said, “I like it, it’s fun. And it feels good to belong to something. To be employed. Be something.” Obtaining part-time work that was relevant to the work she wanted to do in the future gave Norah a sense of achievement and was a clear step on her way toward fulfilling her dream of normality and inclusion. The same can be said about her finishing secondary education as a necessary step toward her plan to attend university.
Although education did have a value in itself, Norah, Doris, and Kate all saw education also as a step toward a bigger end goal of obtaining a meaningful job that would make them feel connected to and accepted by mainstream society (cf. Leverentz, 2014). This way of identifying education as a necessary step toward a bigger dream of inclusion is likely to be age-graded, as well as gendered and classed. In Sweden (as well as elsewhere), more women than men attend university. Attendees also tend to be somewhere in their 20s or early 30s (Swedish Higher Education Authority, 2018). Importantly, higher education is free in Sweden, making enrollment much more attainable than the case would be for women in a similar social position elsewhere. Norah, Doris, and Kate all represent the younger women in the study, which allows them to pursue higher education without deviation from a normative life script. The same cannot be said for Maia, who, despite also wanting to educate herself to achieve a heightened sense of self, never attempted any form of education, and spoke of this dream in a much more fatalistic way. In addition, classic “female-coded” low-status labor (such as nursing) requires a 3-year qualification (as opposed to “male-coded” low-status labor, such as construction work, which does not). As such, it seems likely that gender, age, and social class all mesh together to inform the women’s agentic cognition as they identify high school grades and higher education certificates as necessary steps to take on their pathways to desistance and inclusion into mainstream society. To further investigate the importance of age in relation to gender and class norms to desisters’ future aspirations, the analysis will now turn its focus to a theme shared primarily among the older women.
Dreams of Freedom: A Wish to Escape the Toil of Otherness
A noticeable dream shared primarily among the older women was freedom. Maia, who was living under great stress due to her poor mental health, offers an example of this. At our first interview, she had moved out of her apartment and into supported housing because her PTSD could make her aggressive at times, and she feared she might lose her apartment otherwise. She was unemployed and spent nearly all of her time in her room as she was afraid of what she could be capable of doing, should she interact with other people. In this isolated state, Maia dreamed of a quiet, calm place. She told me,
During our second interview, Maia returned to her dream of getting away from the city:
Such dreams of escaping the stressful city and retreating to the countryside can be read as a wish for freedom. All of the women in this study had been controlled by a variety of institutions (and by men) throughout their lives, and their dreams of freedom can, thus, be linked to wishes for the ability to escape such control. This theme can be developed further with a quote from Nina (age 43), who had been struggling with the social services for decades, and with increased intensity after her release from a 1-year prison sentence. The social services did not support Nina with housing. She was not even provided with a bus card, which she desperately needed to fulfill her commitments to the probation services, along with attending a training program for industrial work that she had engaged in during incarceration and was now entitled to finish. At our last interview, Nina said she was exhausted and in need of a break from her stressful situation. When we talked about her dreams and plans for the future, she said,
Maia’s and Nina’s dreams have a lot in common, as they both use the analogy of “howling with wolves” to emphasize their concept of freedom, and the Scandinavian countryside as a romanticized image offering peace of mind. They also share similar life conditions: They were both experiencing exceptional stress, with little of what they strived for in terms of acceptance by and inclusion into mainstream society in place at the time. They were both unemployed. Neither lived in stable housing, and although both had children, their contact with their families was not as good as they wished it would be. Both had repeatedly been violently victimized by male partners in the past, which contributed to their disregarding the normative dream of heterosexual monogamy otherwise common in contemporary society (see Leverentz, 2006, for the role of heterosexual monogamy in desistance). Stripped of socioeconomic resources, the women now found themselves lacking even the most basic human necessities of shelter, social contacts, and health. In the midst of this chaotic existence, the women dreamed of a secluded space of their own, free from the control that had followed them throughout their lives. Concluding this section, Johanna’s (age 53) narrative will be analyzed as another telling yet somewhat different example of a dream of freedom. Johanna had an apartment of her own. She also had friends and employment (although mostly undeclared) during the 2 years that I followed her. This excerpt is from our first interview:
As is evident from this quote, Johanna held what she herself conceptualized as a “big dream.” Johanna could also point to what was hindering her from living out this dream in the present. She was held back by her financial situation and lacked the resources that would be needed to act on this dream.
A possible theoretical implication of these quotes is that the ability to form plans and hope for the future could depend on the resources available at hand. Like Maia and Nina, Johanna dreamed about freedom and the power to form her life as she wished. The different narratives show how the women’s conceptions of acceptance are tied to control, and that a conventional life sometimes seemed out of reach and as something meant for others, not for them. Time spent in a deviant or criminalized lifestyle could play into this belief, as Maia, Nina, and Johanna all had long histories of a life of exclusion. Being aged 52, 43, and 53, respectively, they represent the older group in the sample. Processes of labeling, and with that, the further consequences of cumulative disadvantage, develop with time spent in a criminalized and socially excluded position. This suggests age-graded patterns in the women’s future aspirations, which coalesce with classed and gendered expectations of normativity. Furthermore, as their children had now grown up, the opportunity to present themselves as caring mothers of dependent children had passed them by. Nevertheless, they all tried to either reestablish or maintain contact with their children, but not having been able to fully assume this role of caring mother—at least during periods of their children’s upbringings due to poverty, exclusion, violent victimization, and (not least) incarceration—had resulted in much guilt and shame for the older women, which complicated their efforts to (re)establish roles as caring mothers (cf. Byrne & Trew, 2008). The older women’s dreams of freedom can be read as a wish to escape society and the toil of otherness, rather than to attempt integration. This notion was not shared among the younger women in this study, implying that age-graded gender expectations play into the women’s abilities to envision a life as changed and included in the mainstream (cf. Lander, 2015). Another possible theoretical link between age and future aspirations is newness to desistance attempts. Time spent in a criminalized lifestyle does not only allow for an accumulation of negative consequences and disadvantages, but also heightens the likelihood for previous attempts at desistance. It is reasonable to assume that a willing desister might grow more cynical about her chances if she has attempted desistance (several times) before. However, regardless of age, the women emphasized that this was their first “wholehearted” or “serious” attempt at desistance, and there was no connection between age and newness to desistance attempts in this sample.
“Modest” Dreaming: (Fulfillment of) Basic Needs as a Prerequisite for Conventionality
When I asked Susie (age 36) about her future aspirations at our first interview, she painted a picture of a “simple” life, with an apartment, a job, and the ability to be a good mother to her two boys.
This dream is much in line with normative femininity. At that point in time, however, Susie had none of the things she recited. Having been released from her last prison sentence a couple of months earlier, she now found herself homeless. Her boys were placed in foster care, and she had no employment at all. In addition, Susie did not hold high hopes of obtaining a job. One week after our meeting, she was scheduled to begin spending her days in what she described as an “atelier,” where she was to “sit and knit.” This would not suit her, she feared, as she saw herself as an active and social individual who liked to keep busy and meet new people, and her concept of this atelier was quite the opposite. To “sit and knit” does not suffice to fulfill the aspiration of having a job, as whatever knitting she could produce in the atelier would not be perceived as actual labor. This is a good example of how rehabilitation programs available for women desisters are constructed in accordance with old gender ideals proclaiming passivity and servility, and how such programs clash with contemporary femininity ideals sprung from a middle-class position, which are informing the aspirations among desisters.
Conversely, Susie had hopes to acquire an apartment of her own. Just a week prior to our first interview, she was offered a three-bedroom apartment in a suburb, where she had already begun picturing a life together with her two boys. However, as she was about to sign the contract, the public housing agency found an old housing-related debt, and deemed her unable to sign. This put up a stark barrier to Susie’s hopes of acquiring housing for herself, let alone for her children. Instead of getting an apartment of her own, she slept rough, or in shelters, before she moved in with an old drug-dealing friend. It did not take long before Susie relapsed into drug misuse, and her situation spiraled downward rapidly from there. As she told me, “God yes, I took all kinds of drugs. Amphetamines and ecstasy, and there were a lot of drugs that I never use otherwise.” To finance her misuse, Susie took to shoplifting. When I met her for our second interview, Susie was imprisoned for theft and a minor drug offence. She attributed her relapse to the goal failure she experienced when her rental deal fell through (cf. Nugent & Schinkel, 2016).
When we revisited her future aspirations at Interview 2, she said that the most important thing for her upon release was to remain drug-free. If she failed to do so, nothing else that she wanted would come into place—a notion in line with previous research (cf. Colman & Vander Laenen, 2012). However, Susie was equally clear that another step had to be taken as a prerequisite to achieve sustained abstinence. She emphasized how she needed a place to live, an apartment of her own, to maintain her abstinence. Other aspects of her bigger dream, such as having a job and having her children living with her, were now far less pressing issues. Susie told me,
From this quote, it is clear that Susie’s bigger dream about a “simple” life in an apartment together with her kids and with a “regular” job still remains the end goal, but is perceived as something quite distant at the moment. Having hit rock bottom and finding herself unable to attain her dream of a happy life with her children, a job, and a home, Susie’s aspiration for her near future had now shifted to focus shelter for herself, along with substitute treatment for the addiction. As such, her future aspirations now had much in common with the older women who dreamed of solitude and the chance to “get away” to find one’s true self. Susie meant that she would not allow herself to “even think about getting [her boys] home” at this point, which emphasizes how the ability to picture a desirable future is regulated by the resources at hand.
However, as the bigger dream of a happy family still remains the end goal, the notion of age-graded, classed, and gendered aspects of future aspirations found in the previous section can be developed further. As Susie’s children were still minors, the (theoretical) possibility to perform normative femininity through motherhood was still available to her. Her future aspirations were built on a vision of herself as a good and caring mother, with a house and a job providing stability for her family. Among the older women, both Maia and Johanna had grown children, and subsequently envisioned solitude to come with a house of their own. Where Susie, much like Norah, Kate, and Doris, aspired to change her ways and fit in with mainstream society, the older women wanted to be left in peace and be accepted as they were, outside of the control of conventional society.
Evolving Dreams: Goal Fulfillment as Hope-Infusing
As has been evident from the analysis thus far, some of the women in the study felt restricted in their pursuit of their dreams. However, others did succeed in achieving goals that they had set up within their desistance journeys. This section, to conclude the analysis, will show how such goal achievements in pursuit of a bigger aspiration affect the desistance journey.
Marie (age 34) told me that when she came out from a 9-month-long drug treatment, following a prison sentence of 1.5 years, together with her then boyfriend, now husband, all she wanted was an apartment of her own. Before this last drug treatment, she had been sleeping rough, or at best at a homeless shelter that she described as “the worst in the city.” Having acquired a rental contract of her own, she soon experienced how her future aspirations shifted slightly, as the next aspirational step toward the dream emerged. Between our third and fourth interview, her family of three moved into a bigger apartment where Marie’s 3-year-old daughter, Amy, could have a room of her own. And no sooner were they settled into this new apartment than Marie could feel the dream shift anew, as she told me,
In contrast to many of the other women, Marie had a lot in place already at our first interview. She was married and had custody of her daughter, a job, and an apartment. In many ways, she was living in line with normative femininity and had things that other women in the study dreamed of having. Monetarily, Marie also had a far less disadvantaged upbringing than the others did. Still, the excerpt shows how Marie proceeded toward her bigger dream of a normal and happy suburban family life via smaller goal achievements that provided direction and gave meaning to her life (such as becoming debt-free and acquiring roomier accommodation for her and her family). Marie’s experience of and statements about evolving future aspirations is an empirical finding much in line with Farrall and Calverley’s (2006) notion of how dreams for the future take shape as desistance progresses. This also highlights the processual dimension of desistance and (re)integration, along with the importance of prospective data to capture it.
Concluding Discussion
By paying close attention to the future aspirations of 10 women in the early stages of desistance, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the processes of desistance from crime. The interviews reveal a diverse range of future aspirations among desisters, and the analysis unravels gendered, class-, and age-graded aspects of such aspirations. The women perceived their present as well as their futures in relation to their pasts. Having lived lives of exclusion and conviction, these pasts were often conceptualized as being in the way of the future, as obstacles to be overcome (cf. Lander, 2015; Maruna et al., 2004).
The division found in the analysis concerning the agentic pursuit of inclusion into mainstream society is interesting, as it implicates age-graded connotations of future aspirations, and how they coalesce with poverty and gendered expectations of normality. The younger women in the study dreamed of a future of inclusion and normality, often in line with a middle-class ideal of normative femininity. For them, their social position offered structural as well as personal opportunities to achieve affiliation in the mainstream, including the possibility to build new identities via higher education or (re)claiming an identity as successful and caring mothers. Conversely, notions of the “happy family” and higher education appeared further away for the older women in the study and were perceived as something for others, not for them. While stable housing was important to everyone, essential differences emerged in the narratives. As the younger women dreamed of a house where they could live happily with their children, the older women sought solitude and dreamed to retreat into a house in the countryside where they would be left in peace, able to escape the control of society. From this, the influence of normative and age-graded as well as gendered and classed life scripts on desisters’ outlook and future aspirations is conspicuous. While the younger women were able to formulate and pursue dreams of inclusion in mainstream society in line with a middle-class ideal of normative femininity, the older women often faced more restricted options, causing them instead to aspire for freedom and to escape the toil of otherness. Furthermore, the finding that inclusion into mainstream society was a lifelong dream that the desisters now aspired to pursue more intensely serves to problematize the concepts of reentry and reintegration often found in the desistance literature. The results presented in this article elucidate such concepts as inadequate terminology to capture the fact that many desisters approach conventional society for the first time as they embark on their desistance journeys, which adds to the complexity of desistance processes and furthers the understanding of the struggles involved.
Labeling is an inherently exclusionary practice (Braithwaite, 1989; Maruna et al., 2004). Having lived a life of exclusion and conviction, all of the women now found themselves stripped of socioeconomic resources as they embarked on their desistance journeys (a finding much in line with previous research; see, for example, Bottoms & Shapland, 2011). Processes of cumulative disadvantage had rendered some of the women lacking even the most basic human necessities of shelter, social contacts, and health. This was especially true among the older women in the sample, which is in line with theory because the downward-spiral process of cumulative disadvantage progresses further with time spent in an excluded and convicted social position (Sampson & Laub, 1997). Thus, social position affects the future aspirations of desisters, as a severely disadvantaged position could put up stark barriers to the very ability to conceptualize a chance for a normative life as a part of mainstream society. Life scripts as cultural imaginaries tied to class, age, and gender further condition what dreams are available to pursue—or even formulate. One elucidating example is family formation, which has been linked to desistance in previous research (Bersani & Doherty, 2018; Rodermond et al., 2016). This article has shown how motherhood is an age-conditioned practice tied to normative life scripts. Young women desisters are able to (re)claim identities as good and caring mothers, while such identities are far more restricted for older women. This is likely to be a gendered finding in at least two ways; as the normative age span for entering parenthood is narrower for women than for men, and as failed parenthood has harsher consequences for feminine than for masculine gender projects (see, for example, Byrne & Trew, 2008). The fact that this study elucidates this matter is likely due to the empirical and theoretical approach of the project. The specific focus on women desisters in different ages stands out in a field where research examining demographic diversity is rare (Bersani & Doherty, 2018), and this finding serves to highlight the potential of a broadened approach to knowledge production to further the understanding of desistance from crime.
Moreover, the results show that if desisters can acquire basic existential human necessities (and, thus, overcome conditions of sufficiently extreme disadvantage as suggested by Giordano et al., 2002, p. 1026), they will be more free to hope, plan, and even take action toward the fulfillment of their goals, which are likely to drive them toward inclusion in society (cf. Barry, 2017; Bottoms & Shapland, 2011; Lander, 2015). Expanding this notion, this article deepens the theoretical understanding of desistance processes by analyzing how dreams and future aspirations interact with agentic efforts to guide the pathway into conventionality and acceptance. Drawing on the narratives of the women who took successful steps toward their dreams of affiliation with the mainstream, it seems reasonable to ascribe meaning to the emotional value of such goal fulfillments within desistance. As the individual achieves interim goals on her way toward her visualized dream, the concept of the dream takes firmer shape and the pathway to desistance simultaneously becomes clearer, too. Thus, vague hopes and dreams that characterize the early stages of desistance can develop into firmer future aspirations via agentic efforts. Much like Nugent and Schinkel (2016) have theorized how repeated goal failure can be detrimental to a desistance process as it leads the desister into a state of hopelessness where the risk of relapse is high, this article has shown that repeated goal fulfillment sparks and fuels hope into a desistance journey. This process of setting up and fulfilling interim goals on a journey toward inclusion and normality provides the desister with an important sense of direction and a reassuring notion of being on the right track toward the dream. This notion is in line with Paternoster and Bushway’s (2009) identity theory, which suggests that a positive possible self can work as a motivator driving agentic action.
The empirical findings of this study have implications for policy. If state support units such as the prison and probation services, social services, and employment services were to factor in future aspirations of willing desisters, more effective and successful support could be developed to help people who strive to change their lives and cease offending. How desisters feel about their progression matters, and such state support could help desisters identify interim goals toward the bigger dream of inclusion into mainstream society (see also Farrall et al., 2014). Specific needs will, of course, vary between individuals, but the mechanism of achieving interim goals toward inclusion should be a common enough need to inform more effective policy and support programs. In addition, state support units should inform desisters about what support the state can offer to facilitate the identified steps toward desistance. Housing, education, and employment, issues that have been highlighted in this article, all fall within areas where support from the state can be expected by its citizens, convicted or not. Yet, this is increasingly not the case, in Sweden but also internationally. In England and Wales, for example, conditionality under austerity means that the possession of a criminal record may reduce or rule out eligibility for the above-mentioned state support (see, for example, Dwyer, 2004). Likewise, in many parts of the United States of America, a criminal conviction renders people ineligible to reside in public housing, receive public benefits (such as welfare and student loans), and work in certain occupations (Gottschalk, 2016). Based on the findings of this study, such structural barriers can prove detrimental to people’s attempts at desistance from crime.
Summarizing the women’s dreams and future aspirations in relation to such dreams, the analysis also shows that although some of the dreams presented by the participants in this study arguably could be conceptualized as “modest and conventional” (see Bottoms & Shapland, 2011, p. 66) and as normative pathways into mainstream society, what can be understood as modest dreams for the general population may be unreachable for desisters who find themselves in a severely disadvantaged social position. Life scripts as cultural imaginaries tied to class, age, and gender condition what dreams are available to pursue—or even formulate. This insight serves to highlight the importance for desistance research to acknowledge how agentic efforts are always acted out in an interplay between subjective and social factors, where structural barriers (such as inability to acquire housing or employment) may render these agentic efforts obsolete (cf. Giordano et al., 2002). This study has shown examples of how such processes and barriers are gendered as well as class- and age-graded, which is theoretically important to acknowledge going forward in our understanding of the complexity of desistance processes.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
