Life course and delinquency trajectory: an exploratory study of events and narratives of young people in vulnerable situations

The project originates from a transdisciplinary dialogue between sociology, psychoanalysis, law, education and health, specifically in relation to the criminological theory of desistance from crime, from life course analysis (Sampson and Laub, 1993; Thornberry and Krohn, 2001). To this end, it is oriented from two main theoretical matrices briefly presented here, namely, life course theory and the psychoanalytic approach to crime. In the sociological perspective, it is proposed to explain the factors that influence the onset, persistence, and interruption of offending activity throughout the life course of individuals. Its central assumptions are: i) changes with age in delinquency present structured sequences and patterns; ii) the dependence of the development of delinquency on the development of the biographical and institutional trajectory of individuals throughout their life course (e.g., relative to family, school, risk factors, contact with criminal justice). Its analyses focus on the determinants of entry, continuity, and desistance from offending activity and allow for the analysis of changes and continuities in offending activity over time, as it considers temporal ordering and changes in the determinants with age.

With regard to psychoanalysis, we find a theory of adherence that affiliates adolescents to the normatization of crime, anchored in rules that are extrinsic to those of the Legal Law, but that coexist with it, in a non-contradictory logic that includes the legislative codes alongside the “iron law” of crime (Lacan, 1973-74). Lacan speaks of dialectical resolutions in the genesis of the self, reformulating itself through the crossing of different complexes-weaning, intrusion, Oedipus, puberty, and adolescence-“in an increasingly alienating form for the drives that are frustrated there and increasingly less ideal for those that find their normalization there” (Lacan,1950/1998, p. 142). Thus, the encounter with crime in one of these passages can be a strong conditioning factor for the entry and permanence in crime.

Research group websites:

Center for the Study of Crime and Public Safety: https://www.crisp.ufmg.br

PSILACS Center (Psychoanalysis and Social Bond in the Contemporary): http://www.fafich.ufmg.br/psilacs/