Civilisation and its discontents
In Glaser’s study of prison and parole systems, he puts forth the well-known argument that “almost all criminals follow a zig-zag path,” such that most individual criminal careers are characterized by movements back and forth between periods of offending and nonoffending. Even the more serious offenders are not “persistently criminal.” Rather, they are “casually, intermittently, and transiently” engaging in crime.
In the desistance literature, this has become a troubling issue: as a criminal career often includes stops and starts, desistance becomes difficult to study. Instead, some researchers have turned to the concept of “temporary desistance,” others to a distinction between “primary” and “secondary” desistance, whereas some have begun to explore the concept of “intermittency,” the latter of which is of interest in this article.
Intermittency has been described as “a temporary abstinence from criminal activity during a particular period of time only to be followed by a resumption of criminal activity after a particular period of time.” In this sense, the criminological concept of intermittency is similar to the cessation/relapse processes identified in research on drug use, but considerably less studied.
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