Each contact with the justice system reduces access to work, housing and stable relationships, which raises the likelihood of the next contact.
The mechanism is structural rather than dispositional: a conviction closes employment, closed employment weakens the bonds that support desistance, and their absence raises reoffending. Small early differences in enforcement therefore compound into large late differences in outcome, without any further difference in conduct.
In practice
- A caution at seventeen removes the apprenticeship that would have made the second offence unlikely.
- A firm's policy of dismissing on charge rather than conviction produces exactly the instability it says it is avoiding.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works