THE GOOD LIFE? Exploring life beyond desistance from crime in two generations of offenders

For the last 40-years of criminal career studies, no concept has been more influential than that of desistance.

Despite this development, however, desistance -- and the real, lived processes allegedly framed by the concept -- are still thorny fields of inqury.

The present project deepens our empirical and theoretical understanding of criminal desistance by conducting extensive in-depth interviews with two sets of Swedish criminal offenders, one born in the 1940s, and one in the 1970s.

These have been previously studied within the frame of the well-known Stockholm Life-Course Project, and data from the previous follow-ups will be utilized in The Good Life? (TGL) too.When individuals leave crime behind, they also, crucially, approach something else (e.g. conformity, conventionality, or "normalcy").

These processes of engagement, or re-engagement, with alternatives to crime, are highly understudied in general, and in need of further study.

Moroever, such processes may be more contingent on gender and sociohistorical context than previously thought, according to recent findings.

Very few qualitative studies of these mechanisms exist, possibly because of the well-known lack of appropriate samples and datasets. In this regard, TGL offers a unique dataset not only in a Scandinavian context but in a European one to.

As such, it has the potential to provide the criminological community, and criminal policy makers, with valuable knowledge and insight into proesses of desistance.