Women, Stigma, and Desistance from Crime

'Gilly Sharpe’s book explores the lives and especially the struggles of young women who had early experience with the justice system. The volume is accessible and highly readable, but represents a significant advance in our understanding of complex mechanisms associated with ‘desistance’ processes and the life course experiences of marginalized women more generally. It is appealing to focus on individual level efforts to forge a better life (e.g., changes in motivation), but Sharpe’s longitudinal follow-up of a sample of women first interviewed as teens shows the ways in which policies and institutional practices often limit opportunities across many aspects of women’s lives. The concept of stigmatization organizes the analysis and makes tangible punitive and inequality-amplifying processes that are often conceptualized as mere abstractions. Women, Stigma and Desistance is especially effective in highlighting the ways in which class, gender, and even brief levels of early justice system contact combine to affect economic viability, housing, motherhood, and a host of other formal and informal ties that play a role in the successful transition to adulthood.'

Professor Peggy Giordano, Bowling Green State University, USA

The issue of women and desistance has attracted relatively little attention over the years. Retracing 36 women who were interviewed between 2005-6 Women, Stigma and Desistance from Crime offers a highly original and compelling perspective on criminalised women’s navigations through stigma, poverty, abuse at the hands of men, alongside additional challenges of child-care responsibilities, with little support from partners or the state, when they were reinterviewed some seven years later. This is a study and story of real importance in which Gilly Sharpe reveals a very long shadow of criminalisation and captures the different ways in which the women have struggled with meaningless penal interference in their lives, without practical or emotional support. The book should be read by academics, policy-makers and practitioners alike. It inspires us to do better!

Professor Loraine Gelsthorpe, Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge, UK

Criminalised young women are too often the forgotten minority inside the criminal justice system and are equally neglected by the academic scholarship around desistance from crime. Thankfully, with this tour de force study, Sharpe illuminates the complex challenges faced by women on the margins in navigating pathways out of punishment cycles.

Professor Shadd Maruna, author of Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives