Examining the Role of Meaningful Work for Desistance Among Justice-Involved Emerging Adults

Employment has long been recognized as an important turning point for facilitating the desistance process among young people. Criminologists, however, often theorize and operationalize employment in a binary nature: having a job or not. Evidence from the field of emerging adulthood has recognized that the socio-structural shifts in society for Millennials and Generation Z have changed how employment functions in the transition to adulthood, which compromises the classical theorizations of criminologists. This study aims to examine the mechanisms behind employment and how it can facilitate the transition to adulthood among emerging adults. The findings demonstrate how meaningful employment is considered an optimal marker for the identity transition into adulthood. Justice-involved young people face barriers in their paths towards meaningful employment, which require developmental and life course criminological theories to adapt their conceptualizations and operationalizations to accurately capture these nuances and improve the body of evidence in the field.