Crime and Social Identity - Criminal Justice

Crime and social identity examines how stigma, labeling, and self-concept shape (Winnick & Bodkin, 2008; Rocque, 2017) the trajectories individuals take toward and away from crime. Within Crime as a Social Phenomenon, the identity dimension of crime connects the micro-level and macro-level (Decker & Van Winkle, 1996) through micro-level processes of self-understanding (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010) and social presentation to the macro-level patterns of criminal careers, desistance, and the differential distribution of criminal designation across social groups. Identity is not simply a byproduct of criminal involvement (Akers, 1998) but but an active dimension of it: the meanings that individuals attach to their own conduct, the ways in which they understand themselves in relation to the criminal law, and the social presentations they make to others each shape the probability of continued criminal involvement and the possibility of exit from criminal careers.

Introduction

The sociology of identity offers criminology a set of analytical tools (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990) that analytical tools that complement and challenge the structural and motivational accounts that have dominated the field. Where structural accounts ask what conditions produce criminal conduct (Heimer & Matsueda, 1994), and motivational accounts ask what drives individuals to offend, identity approaches ask how individuals understand who they are in relation to their criminal conduct — how they narrate their past, conceptualize their present, and project their future selves in ways that either reproduce or interrupt the patterns of criminal involvement that biographical sociology has increasingly documented across the life course.

The identity approach to crime draws on several distinct theoretical traditions (Bernburg & Krohn, 2003) that theoretical traditions. Labeling theory, as developed by Becker and Lemert, showed how formal designation (Braithwaite, 1989) transforms how formal criminal designation transforms the social identity of labeled individuals in ways that increase the probability of further criminal involvement through the mechanism of secondary deviance. Goffman’s stigma theory showed how the attribute of criminal conviction (Irwin, 1970) operates conviction operates as a discrediting mark that reorganizes social interaction and opportunity in ways that persist long after the formal punishment. Identity theory and self-concept research have explored how criminal involvement (Laub & Sampson, 2003) and involvement and criminal designation interact with the individual’s own understanding of who they are — their master narratives, their personal identity, their sense of possible future selves. And desistance research has documented (Giordano, Cernkovich, & Rudolph, 2002) how successful exit from criminal careers is typically accompanied by identity transformation — the construction of a new, conventional self-narrative that repositions the individual’s criminal past as part of a story of change rather than a fixed identity.

This article traces the major theoretical contributions of the identity approach (Hagan & McCarthy, 1997) to identity approach to crime, examines the specific social processes through which criminal identity is formed and sustained, and considers the implications of the identity perspective for understanding desistance, restorative justice, and the consequences of criminal justice contact for the identity of those processed through it.

Labeling Theory and Criminal Identity

Becker’s (1963) labeling theory provided the foundational account (Tannenbaum, 1938) of how formal criminal designation shapes social identity. The designation of an individual as criminal — through arrest, prosecution, conviction (Travis, 2005), and arrest, prosecution, conviction, and the public ceremonies of formal punishment — transforms their social status from a person who has committed a specific act to a person whose primary social identity is “criminal.” This master status — the dominant identity category that organizes all subsequent social interaction — operates as a filter through which others interpret all subsequent conduct: where others might see ordinary behavior, those aware of the criminal label see confirmation of criminal character. The social consequences of this interpretive reorganization — reduced employment prospects (Bushway, 2004), employment prospects, withdrawal of social relationships, exclusion from legitimate opportunity structures — constitute the mechanism through which labeling produces further criminal involvement.

The master status of criminal designation operates asymmetrically (Chiricos, Barrick, Bales, & Bontrager, 2007) across different social groups in ways that reflect the broader stratification of identity resources and social capital. For individuals with strong alternative identity resources — occupational achievement (Uggen, Manza, & Thompson, 2006), achievement, family membership, community standing — a criminal label may be partially offset by the competing claims of these alternative identities. For those without such resources (Clear, 2007) — the unemployed, the socially isolated, the marginalized — the criminal label encounters no competing identity framework and is more likely to become the organizing principle of the individual’s social identity. This differential operation of labeling reflects the more general social dynamics (Gadd & Jefferson, 2007) of relationship between social resources and the ability to manage spoiled identity that Goffman’s stigma theory identifies.

Master Status and Criminal Careers

Goffman’s (1963) concept of stigma — the social attribute (Garfinkel, 1956) that that deeply discredits an individual by reducing them from a whole person to a tainted or discounted one — provides the micro-sociological complement to labeling theory’s account of formal criminal designation. The stigma of criminal conviction operates through the management of social information: in face-to-face interaction, stigmatized individuals must decide whether and how to disclose their criminal history, anticipating the social consequences of different disclosure strategies and managing the anxiety that undisclosed stigma creates. This stigma management process shapes the social interactions (Leverentz, 2014), relationship formations, and opportunity negotiations that determine the life course consequences of criminal conviction far beyond the formal duration of the punishment.

Link and Phelan’s (2001) social model of stigma identified four components (Lofland, 1969) of of the stigmatization process: labeling of differences, stereotyping of labeled individuals, separation of the labeled from the “normal,” and status loss and discrimination. The criminal conviction label triggers all four components simultaneously (Paternoster & Bushway, 2009): it names a difference (criminal versus law-abiding); it activates stereotypes (the criminal as dangerous, untrustworthy, or morally deficient); it separates those with criminal records from those without through formal exclusions and informal social withdrawal; and it produces the concrete status losses of employment discrimination, housing exclusion, and political disenfranchisement that constitute the material consequences of stigma. Understanding the magnitude of these consequences requires attending to stigma (Sampson & Laub, 1997) as stigma as a social process operating through the interaction of labeled individuals with the social institutions and social actors they encounter across multiple life domains.

Self-Concept and Criminal Behavior

Stigma, Spoiled Identity, and Criminal Trajectories

The concept of spoiled identity — Goffman’s term (Scheff, 1966) for the condition of those whose stigmatizing attribute has become definitively public — captures the experiential dimension of criminal labeling that purely structural accounts leave unaddressed. For individuals whose criminal record is publicly known, the task of managing social interaction in the shadow of that record becomes a central organizing feature of daily life: anticipating others’ reactions, navigating disclosure decisions, managing the social distance that stigma creates, and maintaining a coherent self-narrative in the face of identities that others impose. These management tasks consume cognitive and emotional resources that might otherwise be available for conventional engagement, contributing to the social difficulties that stigma research has documented alongside the material barriers of employment discrimination and housing exclusion.

The trajectory of criminal identity formation following labeling is shaped by the social contexts within which the labeled individual subsequently operates. Individuals who, following criminal designation, are reintegrated into conventional social networks — who maintain employment, family relationships, and community ties — are more likely to maintain conventional self-concepts that resist the criminal master status. Those who are expelled from conventional social networks through the secondary effects of labeling — who lose employment through background check policies, who are excluded from conventional housing markets, who find that former social relationships have withdrawn — are more likely to find themselves in the social environments of other labeled individuals, where criminal identity may be normalized and alternative conventional identities unavailable. The social ecology of the post-labeling environment is thus a significant determinant of whether the criminal label becomes a master status or remains a peripheral identity element.

The labeling process has been documented across multiple stages of the criminal justice pipeline, each contributing to the cumulative identity transformation that secondary deviance theory describes. Arrest labels an individual as a criminal suspect before any formal determination of guilt; pretrial detention separates the accused from conventional social life during a critical period of legal processing; conviction formally designates criminal status; and incarceration concentrates labeled individuals in environments where criminal identity is the organizational norm. Each stage compounds the identity effects of the previous one, making the cumulative impact of full criminal justice processing substantially greater than any single designation alone. Understanding the identity consequences of criminal justice contact requires attending to the cumulative architecture of the labeling process rather than treating formal conviction as the sole locus of identity transformation.

Self-Concept and the Decision to Offend

The relationship between self-concept and criminal behavior has been explored through research on the role of identity in criminal decision-making — the processes through which individuals interpret situations as presenting criminal opportunities, evaluate the relevance of that opportunity to their own sense of who they are, and decide whether to act. Matsueda’s (1992) symbolic interactionist account of delinquency proposed that criminal behavior is shaped not only by social bonds and learning processes but by the self-concept that individuals have developed through prior social interaction — their reflected appraisals of how significant others see them, their self-assessments of their own characteristics, and their identifications with different social groups and role positions.

Research within the identity-crime tradition has consistently found that criminal self-appraisals — the degree to which individuals see themselves as criminal or delinquent — predict criminal behavior beyond what structural and motivational factors account for. This finding suggests that the identity dimension of crime is analytically real and not simply a proxy for other causal factors: how individuals understand themselves in relation to the criminal law shapes their conduct in ways that cannot be fully reduced to the structural conditions that produce criminal motivation or to the social learning processes that transmit criminal norms. The specific mechanisms through which self-concept influences criminal decision-making — the interpretation of situations as appropriate for specific selves, the relevance of identity commitments to behavioral choices, the narrative coherence of particular actions with developing self-stories — represent a productive frontier for research that integrates sociological and psychological perspectives on criminal behavior.

Self-concept in the criminal domain is shaped not only by formal criminal designation but by the accumulated reflected appraisals of significant others throughout the life course. Children who are consistently perceived by parents, teachers, and peers as troublemakers, rule-breakers, or problem children develop self-concepts that incorporate these external appraisals, increasing the probability of conduct that is consistent with the self-concept that others’ reactions have helped construct. The early development of delinquent self-concepts — well before any formal criminal designation — thus represents an important pathway through which informal labeling processes produce the criminal trajectories that formal criminal justice intervention subsequently encounters. Understanding this early developmental process has significant implications for prevention: programs that reshape the identity expectations and social appraisals of at-risk youth may interrupt the identity formation pathways to crime more effectively than interventions focused on structural conditions or behavioral incentives alone.

Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) social identity theory provides a complementary framework for understanding how group membership shapes criminal self-concept beyond the individual labeling dynamics that Matsueda’s model emphasizes. When individuals identify strongly with groups whose normative frameworks include criminal conduct — gangs, criminal networks, subcultural groups organized around specific criminal activities — their group identity provides a powerful source of self-definition that can override individual self-concept assessments. The person who sees themselves as a gang member, a hustler, or a member of a criminal subculture is not simply engaging in individual criminal behavior but expressing a group identity whose maintenance requires ongoing behavioral consistency with the group’s normative expectations. Deidentification from these groups — the process of reducing psychological attachment to criminal group membership — is therefore a necessary but often psychologically costly dimension of the identity transformation that desistance requires.

Desistance, Masculinity, and Social Identity

Identity and Desistance from Crime

Desistance research — the study of how and why individuals cease criminal involvement over the life course — has produced a convergent finding that has fundamentally altered criminological understanding of criminal careers: successful exit from crime is typically accompanied, and perhaps enabled, by a transformation in identity that repositions the individual’s relationship to their criminal past and opens new self-narratives of conventional future possibility. Maruna’s (2001) landmark study of desisting offenders in Liverpool documented how successful desisters constructed “redemption scripts” — personal narratives that reframed their criminal past as a formative but ultimately overcome experience, positioned their conventional present as authentic expression of their “true self,” and projected a future of continued conventional engagement. These narrative constructions were not simply rationalizations but active identity-work that enabled continued conventional engagement by providing a coherent self-story that connected past, present, and future selves.

The contrast with the “condemnation scripts” of active offenders — narratives that positioned continued offending as inevitable, authentic, or the only identity available — illustrated how identity construction shapes criminal trajectories through the mechanism of narrative self-understanding. Active offenders could not easily exit their criminal identities not simply because of structural barriers — though those were real — but because they lacked the narrative resources to construct a convincing conventional self-story that would reorganize their social relationships and self-expectations in ways consistent with sustained desistance. The redemption script provides these narrative resources: it enables the individual to claim a conventional identity that others can recognize and respond to, creating the social conditions for the relational changes that sustained desistance requires.

Masculine Identity and Criminal Conduct

The relationship between masculine identity and criminal conduct represents one of the most consistently documented findings in the identity-crime literature: the large gender gap in criminal offending — with men accounting for the large majority of violent crime and a substantial majority of property crime — is shaped in part by the specific content of masculine identity constructions in different cultural contexts. Messerschmidt’s (1993) “masculinities” framework argued that crime is one resource through which men — particularly men who lack access to the legitimate institutional resources for masculine status performance, such as occupational achievement and family provider roles — enact and affirm masculine identities. On this account, gang violence, street robbery, and assault are not simply irrational or sociopathic behaviors but performances of a specific masculinity — street masculinity — that provides status and identity affirmation in social contexts where conventional masculine performance is blocked.

Anderson’s (1999) ethnographic account of the “code of the street” illustrated this dynamic with empirical precision, showing how the masculine identity imperatives of respect, toughness, and the willingness to use violence operated as a normative framework that organized criminal conduct in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Young men who lacked the resources to perform middle-class masculinity through educational and occupational achievement found in street masculinity an alternative identity framework that provided dignity and status — but whose behavioral requirements generated the violent criminal conduct that the code prescribed. Understanding masculinity and crime requires attending to this identity dimension without reducing gender differences in offending to biology or simple socialization, recognizing instead how specific masculine identity constructions in specific social contexts produce the behavioral patterns that aggregate into the observed gender gap in criminal offending.

The transformation of masculine identity that desistance from crime requires has been documented as a central but often underappreciated challenge of the desistance process. For men whose criminal involvement has been bound up with the performance of street masculinity, adopting a conventional identity requires not only access to legitimate employment and stable housing but a renegotiation of masculine identity that replaces street credibility and physical dominance with the provider role, family commitment, and occupational achievement that conventional masculinity valorizes. Laub and Sampson’s (2003) life-course research on the turning points of criminal careers documented how marriage and stable employment function as turning points precisely because they provide new institutional contexts for masculine identity performance — new venues for the expression of responsibility, competence, and commitment that conventional masculinity values, enabling men to construct a masculine identity that no longer depends on street credibility for its content.

Race, Online Spaces, and Criminal Identity

Race, Identity, and Criminal Designation

The relationship between racial identity and criminal designation illuminates one of the most consequential dimensions of the identity-crime relationship: the ways in which racial classification intersects with criminal labeling to produce cumulative disadvantages that cannot be understood through either dimension alone. For African American men in the United States, the criminal label is not simply an individual attribute added to an otherwise unmarked identity but a designation that intersects with a racial identity that already carries stigmatizing associations in a racially stratified society. The “criminal” and “Black male” identity attributes mutually reinforce each other in ways that produce a combined stigma exceeding what either attribute would generate independently, creating the condition that Goffman called “double stigma” — the compounding of stigmatizing attributes that produces severe social exclusion.

Pager’s (2003) audit research on employment discrimination documented the concrete consequences of this intersection: in applications for entry-level employment, Black men without criminal records received callbacks at lower rates than white men with criminal records, illustrating how racial identity operates as a preemptive criminal label that reduces the social standing of Black men below that of white men who have actually been formally designated as criminal. This finding positioned racial identity and criminal identity as interacting dimensions of social positioning rather than as independent variables, and it provided empirical grounding for the theoretical claim that understanding the crime-identity relationship requires attending to the racial organization of identity more broadly.

Criminal Identity in Online Spaces

The emergence of digital social media as a primary site of identity performance and social recognition has created new dimensions of criminal identity formation and management that traditional identity theories were not designed to address. Online platforms provide new venues for the performance of criminal identities — gang affiliation, drug dealing, violent masculinity — through posts, videos, and social media profiles that reach far larger audiences than face-to-face identity performance could. The documented phenomenon of “social media beefing” — the use of online platforms to escalate conflicts between rival groups through taunting, boasting, and threatening posts — illustrates how digital identity performance can generate real-world violence through the mechanism of identity challenge and response, as online affronts to group honor generate offline retaliatory violence.

Digital platforms have also created new forms of criminal stigma management and identity presentation for individuals navigating the consequences of criminal records. Online searches of individuals’ names routinely surface criminal record information, eliminating the possibility of strategic information management that Goffman’s stigma theory assumed, and creating a digital permanence of criminal identity that operates regardless of the individual’s own disclosure choices. This digital permanence of criminal record visibility represents a qualitative change in the stigma management challenge facing individuals with criminal convictions — one that substantially amplifies the secondary consequences of criminal designation by making the information available to all social interactants regardless of the relevance of that information to the specific interaction.

The digital organization of criminal identity also creates new resources for identity transformation and desistance support that traditional models of rehabilitation did not anticipate. Online communities organized around desistance from crime, sobriety maintenance, and identity transformation provide social recognition and normative support for individuals constructing post-criminal identities in social environments where conventional social networks are depleted. The anonymity or pseudonymity of some online identity contexts also provides a resource for identity experimentation that face-to-face social environments do not easily allow: individuals can try out conventional identity presentations online before they feel confident enough to make similar claims in face-to-face interaction, using the digital space as a kind of identity rehearsal stage for the conventional selfhood they are working to construct.

Platform governance decisions about how criminal record information is indexed, accessible, and presented in search results have significant consequences for the digital stigma management challenge that individuals with criminal convictions face. Some jurisdictions have developed “right to be forgotten” frameworks that enable individuals to request the removal of outdated or minor criminal record information from search engine indexes — a form of digital expungement that reduces the perpetual visibility of criminal identity information without necessarily removing it from official records. The development of these digital record management frameworks represents a new frontier in the policy implications of criminal identity theory, extending the concern for rehabilitation and desistance that animates record sealing and expungement law into the digital information environment.

The interaction between offline criminal identity and online identity performance creates analytical challenges for criminological theory that traditional frameworks are not well equipped to address. The person who maintains a conventional offline identity while performing a criminal online identity — or vice versa — presents an identity complexity that neither the master status model nor the redemption narrative model can fully capture. Understanding how individuals manage multiple, potentially contradictory identity performances across online and offline contexts, and how the consequences of criminal identity in one context spill over into others, requires the development of digitally informed identity frameworks that attend to the specific features of networked social environments rather than simply extending frameworks developed for face-to-face interaction.

Restorative Justice, Intersectionality, and Policy

Redemption, Narrative, and Identity Transformation

Maruna’s (2001) redemption script concept has generated significant interest in the design of rehabilitative programs that deliberately cultivate the narrative resources and social conditions for identity transformation. Programs that invite offenders to construct and share autobiographical narratives of their criminal past and their commitment to changed futures — narrative therapy programs, creative writing workshops, participatory storytelling projects — provide the narrative infrastructure of redemption scripting in ways that conventional correctional programs, focused on behavioral compliance rather than identity reconstruction, do not. The evidence on these programs, while limited in its methodological rigor, suggests that they produce genuine identity transformations in participants that correlate with reduced subsequent offending — consistent with the theoretical claim that identity change mediates the behavioral change that sustained desistance requires.

The Circles of Support and Accountability program, developed in Canada for high-risk sex offenders, provides one of the most extensively evaluated examples of identity-focused crime prevention. The program surrounds released high-risk offenders with a circle of trained volunteers who provide social support, accountability, and social reintegration assistance — in effect, creating the social network conditions for conventional identity formation that the offender’s record would otherwise prevent. The evidence on the program’s effectiveness shows significant reductions in reoffending relative to comparison groups, consistent with the identity-support theory that motivated its design. Understanding these outcomes requires the identity framework: the program’s effectiveness cannot be explained by deterrence alone but reflects the relational and identity transformation processes that the volunteer circles enable.

Giordano, Cernkovich, and Rudolph’s (2002) cognitive transformation theory of desistance provided a complementary account of the identity change process, identifying four “hooks for change” that enable desistance: structural opportunities that open paths to conventional identity, exposure to a cognitive “blueprint” for a different kind of person, transformations in the attractiveness and salience of a criminal lifestyle, and shifts in the identity of the self as an agent of change. The critical insight is that structural opportunities for desistance are not sufficient alone — they must be cognitively appropriated, interpreted, and integrated into a transformed self-narrative for their desistance effects to materialize. This cognitive-identity model has significant implications for reentry program design: programs that provide structural support for employment and housing without addressing the cognitive and identity dimensions of desistance may fail to enable the transformation that sustained desistance requires.

The temporal dynamics of identity transformation in desistance are more complex than simple before-and-after accounts suggest. Farrall and Calverley’s (2006) longitudinal research on desistance documented how individuals’ commitments to desistance wax and wane over time — that desistance is a process of gradual identity reconstruction punctuated by setbacks and ambivalence rather than a discrete decision followed by sustained change. The “zigzag path” model of desistance that emerged from their research positioned identity transformation as a long-term project requiring sustained social support and normative reinforcement rather than a single transformative experience. Designing effective desistance support requires institutional frameworks that can accommodate this temporal complexity — that can sustain engagement with individuals across the periods of ambivalence and apparent relapse that the research shows are normal features of desistance processes.

Restorative Justice and Identity Repair

Restorative justice approaches — which bring together offenders, victims, and community members in structured dialogue processes — provide institutional frameworks for identity work that formal criminal justice processing systematically excludes. The restorative encounter enables the offender to participate in the acknowledgment of harm, the expression of remorse, and the negotiation of reparation in ways that both require and reinforce a non-criminal self-concept: the offender who participates in restorative dialogue is positioned as someone capable of moral reflection, empathy, and accountability rather than simply as a criminal subject of legal processing. This repositioning of the offender’s identity in the restorative encounter may contribute to the behavioral effects of restorative justice that outcome research has documented, alongside the deterrence and reintegration effects that more conventional accounts of restorative justice effectiveness emphasize.

The victim-offender encounter dimension of restorative justice also has identity implications for victims, whose accounts of harm are formally recognized and incorporated into the institutional response in ways that formal criminal justice processing often fails to achieve. The recognition of victim identity — the acknowledgment that their experience of harm is real, significant, and deserving of institutional response — provides a form of identity repair that complements the behavioral and relational functions of restorative processes. Sherman and Strang’s (2007) systematic review documented consistently higher victim satisfaction with restorative processes than with conventional prosecution, a finding that may reflect in part the identity recognition dimension of restorative dialogue rather than simply its instrumental outcomes for safety and reparation.

Intersectionality and Criminal Identity

The intersectionality framework, developed by Crenshaw (1991) and subsequent feminist legal scholars, provides analytical tools for understanding how multiple identity dimensions — race, gender, class, sexuality, disability — interact in the production of criminal identity and the management of criminal stigma. The experience of criminal labeling, and its consequences for life-course outcomes, differs substantially across intersecting identity positions in ways that single-axis analyses cannot capture: Black women’s experiences of criminal designation differ from those of Black men and from those of white women in ways that reflect the specific intersection of racial and gender stigmas with the criminal label. Understanding these intersectional dynamics requires analytical frameworks that can hold multiple identity dimensions simultaneously rather than treating race, gender, and criminal status as independent variables whose effects simply add together.

The intersectional approach to criminal identity has significant implications for the design of desistance-supporting programs. Programs designed with the masculinity-focused redemption narrative as their model may not resonate equally with women, with LGBTQ+ individuals, or with members of racial and ethnic communities whose specific experiences of criminal designation and stigma management differ substantially from the white, male, cis-gendered majority whose experiences have typically grounded identity-focused criminological research. Effective identity-focused crime prevention requires cultural specificity and responsiveness to the particular identity configurations of the populations it serves, rather than assuming the universality of the redemption narrative that desistance research has most extensively documented.

Policy Implications of Identity Theory

The criminological identity framework has a distinctive set of policy implications that challenge conventional approaches to crime prevention focused primarily on deterrence and incapacitation. If criminal identity formation is a significant causal mechanism in criminal careers — if being labeled criminal increases the probability of further criminal conduct through the identity transformation mechanisms that labeling and stigma theory describe — then crime prevention requires minimizing the criminogenic identity effects of formal criminal justice contact rather than simply maximizing the deterrent impact of punishment.

This implication points toward several specific policy directions. Diversion from formal criminal justice processing — redirecting first-time and low-level offenders away from the formal labeling processes of arrest, prosecution, and conviction — reduces the identity-transformation risk of formal designation while maintaining accountability through alternative processes. Record sealing and expungement — removing criminal conviction records from public databases — reduces the perpetual stigma management burden that digital permanence of criminal records creates, enabling former offenders to present conventional identities to employers, landlords, and social interactants without the preemptive discrediting that criminal record disclosure produces. Reentry programs that provide not only practical support for housing and employment but also the social recognition, narrative resources, and relational contexts for identity transformation address the identity dimensions of desistance that conventional rehabilitation programs leave unaddressed.

The recognition that criminal identity formation begins in early childhood — through the accumulated effects of informal labeling in families, schools, and peer groups — also points toward prevention investments that reshape the identity-formation environments of at-risk youth rather than waiting for formal criminal justice contact to intervene. Programs that provide at-risk youth with positive identity resources — mentoring relationships, educational achievement opportunities, civic engagement experiences — counteract the delinquent self-concept formation that precedes formal criminal involvement and may prevent the trajectory to formal labeling that produces the most durable criminal identity formation.

Conclusion

Crime and social identity constitutes a domain of criminological inquiry that illuminates dimensions of criminal conduct and criminal careers that structural and motivational accounts systematically leave in shadow. The processes through which criminal identity is formed through formal designation and informal labeling, sustained through stigma management and social exclusion, and sometimes transformed through narrative reconstruction and relational reintegration are not peripheral to the explanation of criminal behavior but central to it. The identity approach to crime demands not only new theoretical frameworks but new institutional designs — for criminal justice processing, for rehabilitation, for restorative justice, and for crime prevention — that take seriously the identity consequences of their operation and the identity resources of the individuals they serve.

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