The best predictor of future criminal behavior is past criminal behavior. At the same time, the vast majority of people who engage in crime are teenagers and stop offending with age. Explaining these empirical findings has been the main task of life-course criminology, and contributing to an understanding of how and why offenders continue their criminal careers once they have started, and how and why they stop, is also the purpose of this dissertation. To do this, the dissertation studies a number of facets of the criminal career: the importance of childhood risk factors (Paper I), the notions of turning points (Paper II) and intermittency (Paper III), and the connection between masculinities and criminal careers (Paper IV). In contrast to much life-course criminological research, the dissertation mainly relies on qualitative life history interviews, collected as part of The Stockholm Life Course Project. The findings suggest a need for increased sensitivity to offenders’ lives, and their complexity. Whereas continuity and change can be understood within a frame of age-graded social control, this perspective needs to be extended and developed further, in mainly three ways. First, the concept and phenomenon of human agency needs closer study. Second, lived experiences of various forms of social stratification (e.g. gender, ethnicity, and so on) must be integrated into understandings of continuity and change in crime, seeing as phenomena such as social control may be contingent on these in important ways. Third, this dissertation highlights the need to go beyond the transition to adulthood and explore the later stages of criminal careers. In closing, the dissertation suggests that we move toward a focus on the contingencies of criminal careers and the factors, events, and processes that help shape them. If we understand those contingencies in more detail, possible implications for policy and practice also emerge. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defence the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Submitted</p>

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Research in life-course criminology has been studying turning points away from criminality. There is although a limited amount of research that has been focusing on parenthood and especially on fatherhood as a potential turning point. The available studies show mixed results in this topic and the findings suggest that there are factors that can both form and restrict fatherhood as a potential turning point towards desistance. The aim for the present thesis is therefore to get a better understanding of fatherhood as a potential turning point from persistent offending and to examine the role and meaning of fatherhood in the criminal careers of Swedish former criminals. Qualitative method in the form of retrospective semi- structured interviews has been used to collect data and five former offenders that became fathers during their criminal career participated in the study. The data have been analysed with systematic text condensation and the results indicate that the men did not desist after becoming fathers. They did however have both intended and unintended breaks from criminality when their child was born, but the criminal lifestyle was their first choice and their children were put on the second place. Relationships to friends and in some cases to the mother of the child was a restricting factor for fatherhood to become a turning point. Another factor that restricted fatherhood from being a potential turning point was human agency. The men concluded that an offending father can not receive help from society if there is no will for the father to desist.

Following the landmark 2016 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Montgomery v. Louisiana, approximately 2,500 men and women sentenced to mandatory life without the possibility of parole as children (sometimes referred to as “juvenile lifers”) became eligible to be released. As these juvenile lifers re-enter into society, it is important to study their life histories and the consequences of long-term incarceration. Although there have been studies that shed light on prison life and reentry, there is insufficient research using a developmental and life-course perspective to understand the prison life experiences of those confined over the course of their adult lives, and how these experiences shape reentry processes. Specific to adults serving life-sentences, the consequences of long-term incarceration can adversely affect health, education, employment history, and family ties, with consequences for the reentry process. However, given that juvenile lifers begin their incarceration at a key developmental stage, it is unclear how the effects of long-term confinement impacts their maturation process, development, and ultimately, their reentry successes or failures following their release from prison. This concurrent mixed-method study employs both semi-structured life history interviews and life history calendars to examine the effects of the criminal justice system over one’s life course. The study captures the lived experiences of men and women in Pennsylvania before, during, and after serving a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of parole. This study aims to better understand how long-term confinement, which commenced during the critical developmental period of adolescence, shapes human development and reentry processes as well as how children sentenced to life without parole make sense and order their lives and regain normalcy upon release. Findings reveal that long-term imprisonment disordered the normal stages of human development for juvenile lifers and had adverse consequences for other life domains such as health (both physical and mental), educational attainment, employment opportunities, and the ability to sustain meaningful familial and romantic relationships. Findings also suggest that although the prison environment was not conducive to the development of responsible and mature behavior, juvenile lifers still experienced a series of psychosocial transitions. These psychosocial transitions generally unfolded in various stages, which allowed juvenile lifers to maturely cope to the demands of prison life and achieve significant changes and growth over their life course even before the landmark Miller and Montgomery Supreme Court decisions. The discussion of the research findings highlights the importance of understanding the dynamic changes that occur for those who experience long periods of incarceration to provide insight into post-release outcomes. / Criminal Justice

Uno degli aspetti più documentati del comportamento deviante è che una porzione considerevole di reati è commessa da più persone che collaborano tra loro, e non da criminali che agiscono in autonomia. Oltre ad analizzare le caratteristiche della compartecipazione nei reati, alcuni studi recenti si sono focalizzati sulla comprensione della sua evoluzione lungo la carriera criminale dell’individuo, e sul suo impatto sulla traiettoria criminale. Il concetto di collaborazione criminale è particolarmente rilevante nel contesto dei gruppi criminali organizzati, per i quali le interazioni tra i membri costituiscono l’essenza del loro funzionamento, e i reati commessi sono spesso logisticamente complessi. Ciononostante, il fenomeno della collaborazione criminale ha ricevuto scarsa attenzione nella ricerca sulla criminalità organizzata, e nessuno studio analizza il suo ruolo nel definire la traiettoria criminale del singolo individuo che entra a fare parte di un'organizzazione criminale. Il presente studio mira a colmare questa lacuna in letteratura analizzando i dati sui 178.427 reati commessi da tutti gli 11.138 individui condannati per associazione mafiosa in Italia tra il 1985 e il 2017. I dati includono informazioni sull’eventuale concorso in reato per ogni crimine commesso. L’analisi condotta si avvale di diverse metodologie quantitative con lo scopo di fornire un quadro descrittivo della collaborazione criminale nella criminalità organizzata; determinare se i membri delle organizzazioni criminali hanno diverse traiettorie longitudinali di collaborazione criminale; comprendere quale sia l’impatto di commettere crimini in collaborazione con altri individui sul comportamento criminale futuro; e studiare come la collaborazione criminale sia correlata con il reclutamento nella criminalità organizzata. I risultati dell’analisi dimostrano che il concorso in reato non è una caratteristica incidentale dei crimini commessi dagli individui che fanno parte dei gruppi criminali organizzati. Alcune delle caratteristiche della collaborazione criminale nel contesto della criminalità organizzata riflettono i risultati principali ottenuti negli studi condotti in altre popolazioni criminali, ma emergono alcune peculiarità. Inoltre, il trend aggregato di compartecipazione nei reati dei mafiosi italiani può essere approssimato da cinque traiettorie che raggruppano individui con caratteristiche specifiche. Infine, la collaborazione criminale appare correlata con dei cambiamenti nei successivi comportamenti criminali degli individui: in particolare, è connessa a una più alta probabilità di commettere reati violenti, e di entrare a far parte dell’organizzazione criminale nel breve periodo. Lo studio discute questi risultati alla luce della letteratura sullo sviluppo dei comportamenti criminali per i membri dei gruppi criminali organizzati, e in relazione alla ricerca esistente sulle cause e conseguenze di commettere reati in collaborazione con altri individui. / One of the most documented findings on delinquent behavior is that many crimes are committed in the company of others rather than by solo offenders. Besides studying the characteristics of co-offending, recent works have focused on understanding its evolution over the individual criminal career, and its impact on the offending trajectory. Co-offending is especially relevant within organized criminal groups, where interactions among participating offenders constitute the core functioning of the criminal organization, and crimes committed are often logistically complex. In spite of this, few studies on co-offending in organized crime exist, and none of them investigates the role that co-offending has on the offending pathway of the single individual. This study addresses this gap in research by analyzing data on all the 178,427 crimes committed by 11,138 offenders convicted for mafia association in Italy between 1985 and 2017. The data set includes information on whether each crime was committed with accomplices. The analysis exploits different quantitative methodologies with the aim to describe the characteristics of co-offenses and co-offenders in organized crime; determine whether organized crime offenders have different longitudinal co-offending trajectories; investigate whether committing crimes with others impacts future offending; and understand how co-offending is related to recruitment into organized crime. Results demonstrate that co-offending is not an incidental feature of crimes committed by organized crime offenders. Some of the characteristics of co-offending in organized crime reflect findings from other offending samples, but some peculiarities emerge. Furthermore, the longitudinal co-offending behavior of Italian organized crime offenders is best approximated by five trajectories that group offenders with distinct characteristics. Finally, co-offending is related to changes in the future offending behavior of organized crime offenders: in particular, it is related to higher chances of engaging in violent forms of delinquency and experiencing organized crime recruitment in the short term. These findings are discussed in relation to both research on the developmental course of offending for members of organized criminal groups, and existing knowledge on the causes and consequences of offending with others.