By Victoria Knight

to understand the kinds of practical steps and activities needed to help support people on probation with digital resources as a means to nourish their desistance journeys. The digitization of the justice sector is complicated, and at times fraught with tensions and anxiety, and it shines a light on important factors like human rights, equality and safety. Slowly evidence is emerging that identifies some of the beneficial outcomes for people on probation – especially where digital resources can help improve human flourishing in different ways. In addition, staff are crucial in the digitization journey and are important brokers in empowering probationers to live a life without crime and reduce their risk of reoffending, now in a digitized world. The paper focuses on digital resources and services for people on probation that can implicitly or explicitly support, initiate and facilitate their desistance.

Academic Insights 2025/03

Manchester, UK: HM Inspectorate of Probation, 2025. 15p.

By Olivia K. Ha , Evan C. McCuish, Martin A. Andresen, & Raymond R. Corrado

To examine individual perceptions of the consequences of crime, the role of criminogenic models, and whether rational choice and criminal social capital are informative of desistance during emerging adulthood. Data from the Incarcerated Serious and Violent Young Offender Study were used to examine the relationship between different aspects of rational choice theories of desistance, criminogenic environment, and offending trajectories measured between ages 12 and 30, calculated using semi-parametric group-based modeling. Offending trajectories were then modeled using multinomial logistic regression. Trajectory analyses identified three desistance trajectories and three non-desistance trajectories. The strongest predictors of desistance trajectories included variables that relate to rational choices that considered the consequences of crime. Rational choice and life course perspectives on desistance as complementary, with sources of informal social control operating in a manner that, along with other factors, helps structure an individual’s consideration of, and importance placed on, the consequences of crime

Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology  2019,

By J.V.O.R. Doekhie.

A qualitative longitudinal analysis of different dimensions of the desistance process among long-term prisoners in the netherlands. In the past decades a growing body of literature has been dedicated to explain desistance from offending behaviour, or to answer the question why some offenders quit crime and others do not. From a classic biological approach, desistance can be explained by processes of maturation (Hirschi & Gottfredson, 1983; Moffit, 1993; Matza, 1964) and sociological theories contributed a great deal to the desistance framework by focusing on changes in social control or bonds and on the effects of important life events in the journey away from crime (Hirschi, 1969, Sampson & Laub, 1993).

Leiden: University of Leiden Repository. 2019. 278p.