Journal of
10.1177/1043986204263778
Maruna
/ DESISTANCE
Contemporary FROM
Criminal
CRIME
Justice / May 2004
Desistance From Crime and Explanatory Style
A New Direction in the Psychology of Reform
SHADD MARUNA
University of Cambridge
Research on offender verbalizations traditionally focuses on the degree to which offenders
accept responsibility (or blame) for their mistakes. This small study expands this cognitive perspective in criminology by incorporating basic findings from the psychological literature on
attributions. Additionally, offender attributions or neutralizations are framed within a life course
perspective. It was found that active offenders and desisting ex-offenders differ in terms of
explanatory style. Compared to desisting ex-offenders, active offenders tend to interpret negative
events in their lives as being the product of internal, stable, and global forces. On the other hand,
active offenders were more likely to believe that the good events in their lives were the product of
external, unstable and specific causes. These other dimensions of offender cognitions may be
useful in understanding the psychological aspects of desistance from crime.
Keywords: desistance from crime; explanatory style; attribution theory; neutralization theory
C
riminologists have long been interested in the explanations or “vocabularies of motive” used by offenders when accounting for their behaviors. Sykes and Matza (1957) argued that these verbalizations, when they are
able to “neutralize” an individual’s sense of shame for an offense, can at least
partially account for persistence in crime, although the evidence on this count
has been mixed (see Agnew, 1994; Copes, 2003). More recently, it has been
This research was funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the H. F. Guggenheim Foundation. Considerable thanks are owed to Dan Casullo, Rik Legault, Samantha Lundrigan, Louise
Porter, and Jason Zeliph for their assistance in collecting and coding the data in this analysis. This
article has also benefited from comments by Hart Blanton, Ros Burnett, Scott Cunningham, Stephen Farrall, Nathan Harris, Christopher Kierkus, Anna King, Tom LeBel, Alex Piquero, Ed de
St. Aubin, Hans Toch, and Richard Wiebe. Substantial assistance from Christopher Peterson and
Tony Ward was most especially appreciated.
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 20 No. 2, May 2004 184-200
DOI: 10.1177/1043986204263778
© 2004 Sage Publications
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argued that to successfully desist from crime, former offenders may need to
make sense of their past lives of crime in specific ways (see, for example,
Maruna, 2001). Braithwaite and Braithwaite (2001) describe this sort of
sense-making for past lives of crime as a form of “shame management”:
In the social-developmental literature, attributions of stability and
intentionality in the context of wrongdoing have been associated with
maladaptive outcomes (e.g., shame, anxiety, despair). In contrast, attributions that connote expectations of change for the better in the wrongdoer
and avoid labeling individuals as possessing global personality deficits
have been associated with positive outcomes (e.g., pro-social behavior,
empathy, self-esteem). (p. 258)
Certainly, explanatory accounts for past crimes are considered to be of paramount importance in the applied world of offender rehabilitation with the
ascendancy of cognitive-based correctional treatment (e.g., Bush, 1995;
McGuire, 1995). To date, however, there has been very little research that
examines the relationship between the key dimensions of explanatory style
and the process of rehabilitation.
EXPLANATORY STYLE IN PSYCHOLOGY
“Explanatory style” can be defined as a person’s tendency to offer similar
sorts of explanations for different events in their life narrative (Peterson,
Buchanan, & Seligman, 1995). According to this view, individuals spontaneously construct explanations (or attributions) for significant and unexpected
life events (Ward, Hudson, Johnston, & Marshall, 1997), and these schematized interpretations are thought to be proximally responsible for the continuity of a person’s actions over time, through “reactive person-environment
interactions” (Dodge, 1993). According to Bruner (1987),
Eventually, the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that
guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose-build the
very “events” of a life. In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we “tell about” our lives. (p. 15)
Considerable research suggests that processing biases seem to occur in
three salient dimensions in this cognitive landscape:
• Internality (“I am solely responsible for this good/bad event”) versus
externality (“This event is someone else’s fault/responsibility”);
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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice / May 2004
• Stability (“The cause is going to last forever”) versus instability (“The cause
will be short-lived”);
• Globality (“It is going to affect everything I do”) versus specificity (“It’s only
going to influence this one thing”).
Explanatory styles that are particularly skewed toward one of these extremes
(e.g., narratives in which people hold themselves solely responsible for
everything that happens to them) are thought to correlate with specific behavioral patterns. As such, considerable work in cognitive psychology focuses
on working to change these thinking patterns as a means of changing the consequent behavior (see McGuire, 1995). According to Seligman (1991), “One
of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that
individuals can choose the way they think” (p. 8).
The best known application of this framework is in depression research
and therapy. In their “revised helplessness theory” of depression, Abramson,
Seligman, and Teasdale (1978) assign a central role to the influence of causal
thinking and emphasize the unique contribution of each of these dimensions
of explanatory style. The theory predicts that individuals who have an
explanatory style that invokes substantially internal, stable, and global attributions for negative life events (and external, unstable, and specific attributions for positive events) will be most at risk for becoming depressed when
faced with unfortunate circumstances like the loss of a job or a relationship
break-up. Persons who use highly internal explanations for negative life
events are thought to increase their risk for depression because of the threat
this poses to their self-esteem. The stability-instability dimension of causal
beliefs is thought to affect the chronicity of helplessness and depression following bad events. Finally, the globality-specificity of causal beliefs influences the “pervasiveness of deficits following bad events” (Peterson &
Seligman, 1984, pp. 348-349).
On the other hand, the theory suggests that mentally healthy individuals
do tend to use highly internal, stable, and global attributions when accounting for good things that happen in one’s life. In Learned Optimism, Seligman
(1991) summarizes these findings clearly:
For nondepressives, failure events tend to be external, temporary, and specific, but good events are personal, permanent and pervasive. “If it’s bad,
you did it to me, it’ll be over soon, and it’s only this situation. But if it’s
good, I did it, it’s going to last forever, and it’s going to help me in many situations.” (p. 110)
This “beneffectance” (Greenwald, 1980) is understood as “self-enhancing
biases that distort appraisals in the positive direction” (Bandura, 1989, p.
1177).
Maruna / DESISTANCE FROM CRIME
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These hypotheses have received substantial research support (Dodge,
1993) but do suffer from something like a “chicken-or-the-egg” dilemma.
That is, it is not always clear if pessimistic thinking increases the risk of
depression or if depression increases the risk of pessimistic thinking.
McAdams (1994) writes,
The truth probably lies with a little bit of both possibilities—cognition as
both a cause and a result of the personality constellation we call depression,
personality and cognition influencing each other, linked in an intricate web
of mutual causation. (p. 511)
HYPOTHESES
There is little guidance in the literature concerning the relationship
between criminality and the three key dimensions of explanatory style, yet
there is some reason to believe that offender psychology might be similar to
that of depression. Although criminal conduct is typically categorized as
externalizing behavior, whereas depression is thought of as internalizing,
recent research demonstrates considerable overlap between the occurrence
of these two phenomena (Capaldi, 1992; McLeod & Shanahan, 1993;
Quiggle, Garber, Panak, & Dodge, 1992). This seems to be particularly true
of long-term, habitual offenders—the “great pretenders” (Shover, 1996) who
recycle in and out of prisons, jails, and drug treatment facilities with great
regularity (see, especially, the psychological portrait in Zamble & Quinsey,
1997). Whereas O’Connor, McGuire, Reiss, Hetherington, & Plomin (1992)
attribute this to “a common genetic liability,” it is also clear that criminal
behavior and depression share common sociological antecedents and risk
factors (e.g., stressful life events, abusive pasts, low social-structural
positions) (see de Coster & Heimer, 2001; Hoffman & Su, 1998).
As such, it was hypothesized (based on the exploratory findings in
Maruna, 2001) that active offenders might tend to differ from reformed former offenders in the same way that depressives differ from nondepressives.
That is, offenders might view positive events in their lives as being the product of external, unstable, and specific causes (i.e., “lucky breaks”) and view
negative events as the product of internal, stable, and global causes (e.g.,
“That’s just the type of person I am,” “Bad to the bone,” “Born to lose,” etc.).
As such, we hypothesized that the process of desistance from crime, like
recovering from depression (see Beck, 1963; Ellis, 1962), might involve
adapting these thinking patterns. Desisting ex-offenders should therefore
view positive events as the product of more internal, stable, and global causes
(i.e., “ . . . because I am a good person deep down”) and negative events as the
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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice / May 2004
product of more external, unstable, and specific causes (e.g., “That was just a
phase I was going through,” or “That wasn’t the ‘real me,’it just happened”).
THE STUDY
Using data collected as part of the Liverpool Desistance Study (LDS) (see
Maruna, 2001), the following analysis is a preliminary attempt to explore the
role of explanatory style in the desistance process. The LDS sample provides
a unique, although certainly not ideal, set of data for empirically exploring
the relationship between explanatory style and desistance. The LDS involved
life story interviews with more than 100 British citizens who had formerly
spent time in prison for a variety of crimes—mostly drug-related and property offending. None had been in prison for murder, sexual assault, or manslaughter. The only individuals excluded from the study, however, were those
who had no offending “career” to speak of (in that, they self-reported only
one or two criminal episodes) or had a history of convictions for sex offending primarily. Both groups seemed to us too different from the other sample
members—who might be considered petty career offenders or the “deskilled
criminal Lumpenproletariat” (Shover, 1996)—to merit inclusion.
The goal of the LDS research was to understand the psychological mindset
that seemed to best support efforts to “go straight” and maintain a desistance
from crime. Approximately 55 of the LDS participants have been classified
as desisting from crime (based on self-reports). These are all individuals who
were once long-term, habitual offenders, but who at the time of the interview
had been crime-free and drug-free for more than a year, and it is important
that they also reported having no plans for future involvement in criminal
behavior. These were not individuals who had stopped offending in the past
or had already desisted. As such, our interest was not in learning how this
desistance happened (i.e., “What made them stop?”) as if this was something
that occurred in the past tense. These were individuals who were desisting
“before our eyes.” That is, the word desistance does not refer to a termination
event that takes place at the time of a last offense. Desistance is the process of
refraining or abstaining, in this case from illegal behavior. As such, the 55
persons being interviewed were categorized as actively desisting because
they were actively engaged in this ongoing process of self-restraint and selfdefinition. The LDS was designed to better understand this psychology (for a
more extensive discussion of sampling and the operational definition of
desistance, see Maruna, 2001).
On the other side, 34 of these interviewees have been classified as persisting or active in their criminal careers. They reported recent criminal activity
and also admitted to explicit plans to continue selling drugs, robbing convenience stores, and so forth. It is important that, following Wright and Decker
Maruna / DESISTANCE FROM CRIME
189
(1994), the “active group” is made up of individuals who are actively
involved with criminal behavior in the community and not drawn from a captive population (see Polsky, 1969).
The desisting and the persisting samples were intended to mirror one
another as closely as possible on static variables such as age, gender, types
and number of crimes committed, age of criminal onset, and high school
completion. The two samples were also generally indistinguishable in a test
of their “Big Five” personality traits (see Maruna, 2001, for this analysis).
The remainder of the other interviews we have conducted have been with less
easily classifiable individuals, who either fall in the vast gray area between
desisting and persisting or else could not be considered to be persistent or
career offenders.
CONTENT ANALYSIS
Although still small, this collection of narrative profiles is large enough to
facilitate some basic and tentative explorations of the role of social cognition
in criminal behavior. Life story interviews (2 hours on average) with LDS
participants were tape-recorded and transcribed, preserving the original language of the interviewees. These transcripts were then content analyzed
using Peterson, Schulman, Castellon, and Seligman’s (1992) Content Analysis of Verbatim Explanations (CAVE) system. Based on Seligman’s theory of
explanatory styles, CAVE is an innovative and well-established method for
measuring the cross-event consistency in the explanations individuals provide for both positive and negative events in their lives. The CAVE system
has been used in studies of depression, precursors of mental illness, and the
success of presidential candidates. This previous research provides strong
support for the construct validity of the CAVE technique, and coders trained
by the system’s authors have been able to achieve interrater reliability levels
exceeding .90 (Peterson et al., 1991, p. 386).
The primary advantage of this coding scheme, however, is that it allows for
the examination of the three key dimensions of causal explanations
(internality-externality; stability-instability; and globality-specificity)
within the everyday language and actual life stories of individuals. Although
pencil-and-paper questionnaires have also been designed to gauge these
dimensions of explanatory style, narrative methodologies have certain
advantages over more tightly structured questionnaire measures (Emmons,
1999, p. 63). In particular, narrative analysis allows for a contextualization of
these themes that is quite difficult to accomplish with standard screening
instruments. According to Peterson (1992), “Idiographic research shifts
attention away from abstract psychological variables and reorients it toward
the lives of individuals” (p. 107).
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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice / May 2004
Further, the systematic content analysis of verbal material has the advantage of eliciting more spontaneous and less artificial responses than selfreport questionnaires (Harvey, Weber, & Orbuch, 1990). As such, Peterson
(1992) describes content analysis as a “particularly good assessment strategy, not a ‘second-best’ procedure” for assessing attributions and cognitive
style (p. 379).
The circumstances under which causal explanations are made without
prompting are precisely those under which subjects are most likely to be
mindful and thus most apt not to respond glibly or automatically as they
might on a questionnaire. (p. 379)
Nonetheless, the use of content analysis introduces numerous reliability
problems, stemming from the multiple interpretations of subjective materials. As such, significant measures were taken in this analysis to protect
against bias in the coding process. Two graduate students, blind to the
hypotheses of this research, were trained in Peterson’s method for extracting
attributions from transcribed interview material (see Peterson et al., 1991, pp.
383-386). A person’s attributional style is thought to differ depending on
whether the explanation is provided for a positive event (“I got a job last
week”) or a negative event (“I got fired last week”). Therefore, extracted
attributions were divided into positive attributions and negative attributions
at this stage. The events extracted were not all criminal acts. Explanatory
style suggests that individuals are consistent in their accounting styles across
a variety of acts. The only criteria for inclusion in this research, therefore,
was that an act was either clearly a negative or positive event in the person’s
life. This judgment was made by the student extractors based on the context
surrounding the passage in the longer narrative transcript.
These students were able to identify at least four negative life events and a
minimum of three positive life events in every transcript using the rather conservative and specific criteria for extractions specified by Peterson and colleagues. The open-ended, life history interviews from which these transcripts
were made differed considerably in length, ranging from 1 hour to more than
3 hours in many cases. As such, it is not unusual that the number of events
mentioned would vary from transcript to transcript. Nonetheless, the mean
number of negative and positive events extracted were not significantly different for the persisting and desisting groups, suggesting at a minimum that
the measures are equally reliable. That is, were desisting narratives to contain
20 extracted events, whereas only 10 could be found for the persisting group,
one might worry about systematic biases in comparability between the two
samples.
Maruna / DESISTANCE FROM CRIME
191
Once these passages were extracted from the full-text transcripts, two
additional graduate students, also blind to the hypotheses of this research,
coded the explanations using Peterson’s content coding scheme. After a 2week process of training using pilot interview transcripts, the coders were
provided with long lists of unidentified attributions, extracted from the larger
context of the life story interview and randomized within and between participants. This list, therefore, took the following form:
EVENT: A bad thing happened.
EXPLANATION: Because I was misled by my peers.
EVENT: A good thing happened.
EXPLANATION: Because I worked hard to make it happen.
Because of the precautions taken in randomizing the presentation of these
anonymous passages, raters were not biased by previous ratings for the same
subject and would have no way of easily connecting any series of passages.
Most important, coders had no way of knowing whether the speaker of any
particular passage was an active offender or a desisting ex-offender from the
information they were given. Any passage that mentioned desistance or persistence in crime specifically and in the present tense (e.g., “That is what has
kept me straight these last few years . . . ” or “which is why I am still selling
drugs today”) was obviously excluded from the coding or else modified in
such a way as to remove the reference to desistance/persistence.
Coders rated each extracted attribution on three dimensions (internal, stable, and global) using a scale of 1 to 7, with 7 representing the highest possible score. Coders were instructed to rate each dimension independently of the
other dimensions. Indeed, coders found it easiest to code all of the extractions
on a single dimension (e.g., stability), then return to the beginning of the list
and recode all of the same extractions on a different dimension. Their focus
was not on the positive or negative events themselves but on the explanations
for the events. The scores are meant to represent the speaker’s point of view
and not the rater’s perspective on the particular event. Tables 3, 4, and 5 provide prototypical examples of the types of extracted explanations that
received high scores (5 to 7 points) or low scores (1 to 3 points) on these three
key dimensions. All of these responses are drawn from the actual LDS data.
In coding the internal-external dimension (see Table 1), raters were trained
to assign a score of 1 when the individual attributes blame or credit to someone or something completely external to the self. Ratings between 2 and 6 are
assigned when explanations divide blame or credit between the self and others, with the higher numbers emphasizing one’s internal responsibility. A
score of 7 is reserved for cases in which the individual attributes causality
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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice / May 2004
TABLE 1
Internal-External Explanation Dimension Examples
Negative internal explanations (scored 6 or 7)
NEGATIVE EVENT: I never really spoke to my father (as a teen).
EXPLANATION: Just because of the way I was.
NEGATIVE EVENT: I got put in a battered wives’ home.
EXPLANATION: Because I wasn’t a very good mother to my children.
Positive internal explanations (scored 6 or 7)
POSITIVE EVENT: They [the prosecution] never got no evidence on me.
EXPLANATION: Cuz I was clever.
POSITIVE EVENT: I got peace for the next few years [from those who had bullied me].
EXPLANATION: Because I had stood up to them.
Negative external explanations (scored 1 or 2)
NEGATIVE EVENT: I was mixing in with smackheads (addicts).
EXPLANATION: Cuz they’re in the next cell.
NEGATIVE EVENT: I just started to take drugs then.
EXPLANATION: It was just where you lived, the thing to do.
Positive external explanations (scored 1 or 2)
POSITIVE EVENT: I just sailed by in prison.
EXPLANATION: Me brothers had been in there, and they . . . had their reputation.
POSITIVE EVENT: I don’t have much of a criminal record.
EXPLANATION: ‘Cause my family is in the police.
entirely to one’s own behavioral, physical, or mental characteristics (see
Peterson et al., 1991, p. 387).
The stability dimension (see Table 2) is intended to reflect the persistence
or chronicity of an event’s cause (not the event itself). Raters were trained to
take four characteristics of explanations into account when coding this
dimension: verb tense, probability of recurrence, whether the cause is intermittent or continuous, and whether the attributed cause is characterological
or behavioral in nature. A score of 1 would be reserved for an explanation that
is based on something that occurred in the past, has no chance of happening
again, was a sporadic event, and focuses on behavior rather than permanent
traits of a person (e.g., “because I lost my first tooth that day”). On the opposite extreme, a score of 7 would be used for explanations that are in the present tense, have a strong likelihood of persistence, and focus on continuous
traits (e.g., “because my family is cursed”).
Finally, the global-specific dimension (see Table 3) reflects the extent to
which a cause affects many aspects of a person’s life or just a few. According
to Peterson and colleagues (1991), “This dimension often proves the most
difficult to rate because there may not be enough information to indicate how
widespread the effects of the cause might be” (p. 389). The coding manual
Maruna / DESISTANCE FROM CRIME
193
TABLE 2
Stable-Unstable Explanation Dimension
Negative stable explanations (scored 6 or 7)
NEGATIVE EVENT: They withdrew the [work] placement and said I couldn’t be
employed by them.
EXPLANATION: Because I am an ex-offender.
NEGATIVE EVENT: My ex-partner tries to stop me from seeing my kid.
EXPLANATION: Because she’s a spiteful cow.
Positive stable explanations (scored 6 or 7)
POSITIVE EVENT: Me mum and I get on great.
EXPLANATION: She just knows me so well.
POSITIVE EVENT: I stand by me mum.
EXPLANATION: ‘Cause she’s just smothered me in love and it’s been like that all my life.
Negative unstable explanations (scored 1 or 2)
NEGATIVE EVENT: I don’t think I’m going to pass it [a qualifying test].
EXPLANATION: Because I haven’t fully applied myself to it.
NEGATIVE EVENT: She won’t let me see my kids.
EXPLANATION: Because I done the worst mistake possible in my life; I slept with a girl.
Positive unstable explanations (scored 1 or 2)
POSITIVE EVENT: I was running as well, you know, getting really fit.
EXPLANATION: Because me medical [exam] was coming up.
POSITIVE EVENT: I got off the heroin.
EXPLANATION: ‘Cause my girlfriend, she was pregnant.
suggests that raters think of a person’s life as involving two broad categories:
achievement and affiliation. If an attributed cause is likely to have a strong
effect on both dimensions (e.g., “because I’ve lost my will to carry on”), they
are told to code it a 7. If the cause affects only one of the two aspects of one’s
life, and only marginally so (e.g., “because I had to go to a conference that
week”), it would be scored as a 1.
In all, more than 1,250 separate attributions, an average of slightly more
than 14 in each of the 89 interviews, were extracted and then double-coded by
separate raters on all of the six key dimensions of explanatory style. This was
a painstaking and highly labor-intensive process. In a measure of agreement,
the two independent scorers achieved a correlation of .79 in their coding of
these extractions. Large discrepancies between raters on a particular item
were worked out in a conference between the two raters and the author. Most
such disagreements were the result of one of the scorers inadvertently marking a 7, when intending to mark a 1 or vice versa. Remaining, smaller disagreements in coding (e.g., when the coders were one or two points away
from each other) were settled by averaging the two coders’ scores. Final
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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice / May 2004
TABLE 3
Global-Specific Explanation Dimension
Negative global explanations (scored 6 or 7)
NEGATIVE EVENT: I tried to kill myself.
EXPLANATION: The drugs were just making me crazy.
NEGATIVE EVENT: I went back to drugs after the accident.
EXPLANATION: Because everything just fell apart for me.
Positive global explanations (scored 6 or 7)
POSITIVE EVENT: I’m going on another [college] course.
EXPLANATION: Because I just want to do something positive with my life.
POSITIVE EVENT: I’ve learned I’ve got to grow up now.
EXPLANATION: [Because] I’ve got responsibilities and I’ve got to face life.
Negative specific explanations (scored 1 or 2)
NEGATIVE EVENT: I used to [skip school].
EXPLANATION: I wasn’t really interested in it.
NEGATIVE EVENT: The last time I shoplifted was for food.
EXPLANATION: Because I couldn’t afford to buy it.
Positive specific explanations (scored 1 or 2)
POSITIVE EVENT: I was the only one who stayed [with a certain training course].
EXPLANATION: I liked it; the others didn’t really understand it.
POSITIVE EVENT: I am using Methadone now.
EXPLANATION: I’m using that to balance myself out now.
scores in the six dimensions represent an averaging of the ratings in each
dimension across all of a participant’s extracted attributions.
DATA ANALYSIS
Once the data were coded in this way, we were able to ask whether the
explanatory style of former long-term offenders desisting from crime was
different from the style of former long-term offenders who were still persisting in criminal activities. The question being asked was in this sense explicitly correlational rather than causal. The hypothesis was that an optimistic
explanatory style could help support and maintain efforts to stay crime free in
a way that other cognitive mindsets could not.
Logistic regression analysis was used to estimate the relationship between
each of these dimensions of explanatory style and criminal activity status.
The logistic regression procedures considered most appropriate for dichotomous dependent variables use maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters in the model (Long, 1997). Odds ratios of variables were calculated by
raising the base of the natural logarithm to the power of the logit coefficient.
For continuous predictors, such as the measures of explanatory style, the
Maruna / DESISTANCE FROM CRIME
195
TABLE 4
Pearson Correlations and Descriptive Statistics for Explanatory Style Variables
Desisting
Group
(N = 55)
1
1. Negative-internal
2. Negative-stable
3. Negative-global
4. Positive-internal
5. Positive-stable
6. Positive-global
2
3
4
— .228 .299* .218
.076 — .131 –.032
–.201 .037
— .239
.328 –.004 –.031
—
.235 .369* .049 .173
–.089 –.099 .083 .032
5
6
.117 .042
.190 –.051
.058 .309*
.166 .122
— .158
.290 —
M
SD
3.26
3.23
3.92
4.50
4.70
4.47
.80
.79
.71
.93
.77
.77
Persisting
Group
(N = 34)
M
SD
3.83* 1.35
3.76* .96
4.15
.77
4.06* 1.06
4.04* 1.11
3.81* .86
NOTE: Persisting group correlations are on the left; desisting group correlations are on the right.
* p < .05.
odds ratio indicates the change in the odds of an event occurring when the
predictor increases by one unit, controlling for other variables in the model.
FINDINGS
Descriptive statistics for the independent variables are presented in Table 4
below. The mean desisting group scores differ from the persisting group on
five of the six dimensions at a level that is statistically significant in means
comparisons. All of the significant differences were in the hypothesized
direction. The attribution variables were weakly correlated with one another,
although not to the degree that the three dimensions seemed to be measuring
the same construct.1
Table 5 presents the unstandardized logit coefficients and odds ratios for
the logistic regression model of the main effects of explanatory style as predictors of desisting from criminal behavior. As hypothesized, internal,
global, and stable explanations for negative life events were negatively associated with desistance from criminal behavior, and internal, global, and stable explanations for positive events were all positively associated with
reform. Although all six measures had modest, zero-order correlations with
criminal reform, the logistic regression indicates that only the three dimensions of positive explanations and the negative-internal dimension had
unique and significant contributions (p < .05). All of the effects were in the
expected direction.
These results hold when variables such as age, marriage, gender, employment, age at first arrest, drug involvement, age at first conviction, and previous convictions are added to the model. This is almost certainly a result of the
sampling procedures used. The range of ages and criminal histories of mem-
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Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice / May 2004
TABLE 5
Logistic Regression for Desistance From Crime
Independent Variable
Negative-internal
Negative-stable
Negative-global
Positive-internal
Positive-stable
Positive-global
Constant
Model χ2
B
–.8091
–.6564
–.6568
.7239
1.0296
.9991
–3.5394
39.40
S.E.
.3172
.3614
.3932
.3440
.3811
.4035
3.0502
6 df
p Value*
.0107
.0693
.0948
.0353
.0069
.0133
.2459
.000
Exp(B)
.4452
.5187
.5185
2.0624
2.7999
2.7158
* p values computed for one-tailed significance tests.
bers in the Liverpool sample were purposefully restricted to ensure that the
representatives in the desisting and persisting groups were drawn from the
same types (generally, 25- to 35-year-old ex-convicts with extensive criminal
records and drug use spanning at least a decade). To the extent that explanatory styles covary with demographic variables like age, race, and gender, this
study might have also artificially restricted the range of attribution styles as
well.
SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION
The findings from this exercise suggest an interesting, possible relationship between explanatory style and criminal desistance. First, negative-internal attributions are associated with persisting in criminal behavior. The odds
ratio for negative-internal explanations is .45, meaning that the odds of being
in the desisting group diminish by a factor of 1/.45 (or 2.22) for each unit
increase in negative-internal explanations. This finding, which is largely consistent with the sociocognitive research on depression, suggests that someone might be less able to desist to the extent that negative events are seen as
originating from internal sources (“This is just the way I am”)—especially
when these are stable (“I’ve always been this way”) and global (“I fail at
everything I do, no matter where I go”) characteristics. Examples of these
explanations in the narratives of active offenders include the following:
NEGATIVE EVENT: I wanted to get a job when I got out of prison, but I went back
to crime.
EXPLANATION: ‘Cause it’s the only way I know how.
NEGATIVE EVENT: [My criminal activities] got worse and worse.
EXPLANATION: Once you’ve had a taste of it, you want more. You want more
and bigger and better things then.
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197
On the other hand, the odds that a participant in this sample is in the desisting group more than double for each unit increase in their positive-internal,
positive-stable, or positive-global explanations. One might speculate, therefore, that the more individuals are able to attribute positive life events to
broad, long-lasting personal qualities (e.g., “Because I am a worthy individual”), the greater the odds may be that they will be able to stay crime free.
Some examples of this sort of beneffectance or optimistic bias among
desisting ex-offenders in the LDS sample include the following:
POSITIVE EVENT: I love working with computers.
EXPLANATION: Because it’s like I can be myself now.
POSITIVE EVENT: I’d like to get a job doing counseling.
EXPLANATION: Truthfully, I would, because I’d be good at it. I’m great with
people.
POSITIVE EVENT: I’m starting a (training) course, and I want to do it right.
EXPLANATION: ‘Cause I’m pretty intelligent.
Whether these explanations are objectively true or not (e.g., maybe the last
speaker is not terribly intelligent in terms of some standardized test), these
self-narratives seem to be the most supportive of efforts to maintain
desistance from crime. They might therefore be seen as “positive illusions”
(Taylor, 1989).
These findings suggest that in our focus on offender neutralizations, criminologists might be missing a potent area for future research: offenders’ attributions for positive life events. Another implication of these results is that it
may be useful to look beyond the internal-external dimension of locus of control in criminology. Starting with neutralization theory, criminologists have
long been interested in whether offenders accept internal responsibility for
their actions or blame these events on external factors. These findings suggest that equal attention might be paid to other dimensions of cognition
related to controllability. In the LDS sample, the dimensions of stability and
globality seem to be better stronger correlates than internality, and Guerra,
Huesmann, and Zelli (1990) found precisely the same thing in their study of
attributions and aggressive behavior. They conclude that their findings “shed
some doubt on the utility of the locus of causality construct in understanding
aggressive behavior among delinquents, but do suggest that investigations
focused on controllability may prove useful” (p. 353). In fact, as explanatory
style research has progressed in other areas of study, the internalityexternality dimension has become of less interest over the years. According
to Peterson (2000), “It has more inconsistent correlates than do stability or
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globality, it is less reliably assessed and there are theoretical grounds for
doubting that it has a direct impact on expectations per se” (p. 48).
NOTE
1. Of the three modest associations, two suggest a correlation between parallel
explanations for positive and negative events within the samples. For example, in the
active offender sample, participants who tend to blame stable forces for bad events
seem more likely to also credit stable forces for good events. The same relationship is
found with the globality dimension in the desisting sample, and this, of course, makes
intuitive sense. At the same time, there are strong theoretical reasons (see Carver,
1989) for considering each dimension separately for negative and positive events in
an exploratory study such as this. We do not know enough about the constellation of
attribution styles of offenders to begin combining these dimensions into various constellations as is occasionally done in research on depression.
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Shadd Maruna is a lecturer at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge (UK).
Previously, he was an assistant professor at the School of Criminal Justice at the Unviersity at
Albany, State University of New York. His research focuses on ex-offender reintegration and
desistance from crime. His book Making Good: How Ex-convicts Reform and Rebuild their
Lives(American Psychological Association Books, 2001) was awarded the American Society of
Criminology’s Michael J Hindelang Award for 2001. He has recently co-edited a new book on the
topic, After Crime and Punishment: Pathways to Offender Reintegration (Willan Publishing,
2004).