The Transition from Juvenile Delinquency to Adulthood Criminality in Ghana; the prediposing factors

The study seeks to investigate the social factors explaining persistence and desistance from crime as juvenile delinquents transition to adulthood. Specifically, it examines to what extent socio-demographic factors, labeling and the criminal justice system reinforces crime over the life course. The study further determines whether the patterns of offending and desistance from crime differ for men and women over a life time. The question of which social factors modify the tendency to persist or deist form crime is also addressed. Although the causes of crime and delinquency have been studied extensively in Ghanaian literature, in the actual sense, there is a knowledge gap on what social forces affect persistent offending behavior through adulthood. The study contributes to criminological literature on crime and the life course by presenting qualitative narrative accounts of juvenile delinquents who have transitioned to adulthood criminality and determining from the patterns of their experiences what forces within the social domains shaped their criminal trajectory. To achieve this goal, the study will rely on qualitative research method by engaging respondents in an in-depth interview session. Data would be collected from 40 adults (Males & Females) who have persisted and desisted from crime to adulthood and ten prisons officer working in the state correctional centers. Thus, 20 out of the 40 respondents will be sampled from the Nsawam Medium Security Prisons while the remaining (20 adults) will involve those once delinquents but have desisted from crime living in their private homes. The ten prisons officers will also be interviewed to share their views on the extent to which the programmes run by the prisons service effectively address the problem of youth re offending in Ghana.