Crime in the breaking: Gender differences in desistance

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 has been derived only from samples of male offenders. We evaluate whether there are gender differences in the pre dictors of both self-reported illegal earnings and arrest among samples of recently released male and female offenders. Our analysis of gender differe nces illustrates how both the behavior of the offender and the behavior of law shape our understanding of the transition out of crime. We analyze even t history data from a large-scale social experiment that provided employmen t to male and female offenders. The results indicate that (1) gender differ ences in the predictors of desistance largely depend on the domain of behav ior under consideration; (2) indicators of normative status, as opposed to the perceived risks of crime or age-graded informal controls, are particula rly important determinants of women's risks of rearrest.