The Voice of Crime

Julie Leibrich

Studies of former criminal offenders who have “gone straight” pose exceptional difficulties of strategy and ethics, and previous research has been both rare and narrowly focused. The present research made a major shift in direction by interviewing a random sample of both men and women who had been conviction free for approximately three years and who had a variety of offences.

The first step in follow-up studies is to find out if people have really stopped offending or have just got better at avoiding being caught. The second step is to come to grips with what going straight means.

This article describes what offenders said about these matters, and tries to solve some of the conundrums of definition. The results clearly show that “going straight” for former inmates involves the notion of improvement to less serious offending, rather than complete elimination of all offending (desistance). The usual solution to reducing crime is to reduce the fraction of the population that commit crime, but an alternative solution is to reduce the rate or type of crime committed, and the research presented here suggests this is a meaningful way to measure crime reduction, and a useful model for developing strategies of crime reduction.