Desistance‐Focused Criminal Justice Policy Research: Introduction to a Special Issue on Desistance from Crime and Public Policy

From a very small base of empirical studies in the 1940s and 1950s, the literature on how and why people stop offending has grown rapidly in the last two decades (see Laub and Sampson (2001) for a comprehensive review). Only recently, however, have researchers started to forge links between studies of desistance from crime and ‘What Works’ in offender management policy (see especially, Maruna and Immarigeon 2004 ). This ‘coming together’ of research into why people stop offending and the (re‐)emergence of concerns with effective practice is, like many partnerships, partly the result of good timing, partly the result of fortune, and not without its tensions and struggles. The purpose of this introductory essay, and indeed of this special issue, is to explore these tensions in greater depth than has been possible in previous work.