Amputation or Reconstruction? Notes on the Concept of “Knifing Off” and Desistance From Crime

By Shadd Maruna, K. Roy. 2007

303 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3c8688d281af08d9c8377563bbea567d83213b9c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Human Agency and Explanations of Criminal Desistance: Arguments for a Rational Choice Theory (2015, background): “One of these was developed and elaborated by Maruna and colleagues [23, 54-56].”
Reflections on social values, offending and desistance among young adult recidivists (2011, background): “Maruna and Roy (2007) have also described how offenders, looking back over their lives, may need to ‘knife off’ (symbolically separate themselves from) or deny some parts of their past, but most can work with it, though stressing how they have changed.”
Examining the process of offender change: the transition to crime desistance (2009, background): “The external and internal influences of transition may even be cyclical or bi-directional to such a degree that it will be highly difficult to unravel the unique influences of decreases in criminogenic needs and increases in agency for desistance behaviour (Kazemian, 2007 ; Maruna & Roy, 2007 ).”
The pains of desistance (2016, background): “The interviewees’ main action in establishing act-desistance was to ‘knife off’ relationships with their peers, offending opportunities and their anti-social past (Maruna and Roy, 2007; Weaver and McNeill, 2014).”
The Ties That Bind (2014, background): “With respect to the former, Maruna and Roy (2007) described the term knifing-off as a purging of one’s previous ways, social roles, including associates, disadvantage, stigma, and opportunities.”
Protective Factors for Violence Risk in Forensic Psychiatric Patients: A Retrospective Validation Study of the SAPROF (2011, unknown): “We can learn from research on desistance (Ezell & Cohen, 2005; Maruna, 2001; Vaughan, 2007) and knifing-off (Maruna & Roy, 2006), that reductions in violence risk over time can be the result of the processes of aging and maturation.”
The Effects of Prisoner Attachment to Family on Re-entry Outcomes: A Longitudinal Assessment (2016, background): “Visits may contribute to maintaining or improving the quality of family attachments, whilst those prisoners with fragile family attachments may see these relationships further ‘knifed off’ as a result of the stresses induced by incarceration (Maruna and Roy 2007).”