The purpose of this report is to provide a literature review on desistance from crime which is intended to open up suggested lines of enquiry which the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) might then pursue in its policy programme - specifically its emerging work on offender engagement. The report was commissioned and should be interpreted not as a systematic literature review of desistance research, but rather as a deliberately discursive and speculative paper, which aims to scope out some of the implications of desistance research for offender management, rather than to make any definitive statement either about desistance research or about its interpretation in practice.
