Turning points for criminality and drug addiction : Real life stories

Since the effects caused by drugs and criminality puts a strain on society's resources it is important to find ways of preventing individuals from starting these behaviours and to find out how people who already developed them, are able to desist from them. The processes that cause life to take positive or negative turns are very complex and hard to understand. The best way of exploring these processes were by asking the people who have experienced them to explain their perception of them. If recurring factors between these processes could be found, it could be of great meaning for the development of new treatment methods. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine if there were recurring factors in the individual negative and positive turning point processes of people recovering from criminality and substance abuse, by analysing the participants own life stories. A narrative approach was chosen and the sample consisted of members from the local KRIS organization, who all had a history of criminal behaviour and drug addiction. The data collection was conducted through narrative interview method and a holistic-content method was used in the analysis together with an application of the Age-graded theory of informal social control on the results. The study found that there were different sorts of connections between the processes, but that these were individually formed after each person's own life-course. The negative turning point processes showed more similarities between the participants than the positive turning point processes. The conclusion was that attachments to family and the social context one chooses to be a part of, were recurring factors which had important effects on both the negative and the positive turning point process. Informal social control through attachments to society and family seemed to affect criminality and the use of drugs in general.2017-06-01