MrChuol Puot

Exploring Desistance Among Formerly and Currently Justice-Involved African Australian Young People

Project Summary

Despite high rates of overrepresentation in the youth justice system, little is known about how African Australian young people desist from crime or what truly supports their success. While desistance theory is well established, it has historically overlooked the lived experiences of culturally and racially minoritised youth in the Australian context.

This PhD project addresses that gap by centring the voices of 23 African Australian young people with varying levels of justice system contact. Through in-depth interviews across four participant groups, the research explores the individual, social, and structural factors that shape pathways out of offending.

A key component involves co-design workshops with young people and community leaders to develop culturally grounded, practice-ready interventions. Rather than focusing on risk and overrepresentation, the project highlights support, strengths, and identity transformation—providing urgently needed insights to inform more effective and culturally responsive youth justice policy.

Research Aims

• Understand how African Australian youth make sense of their desistance journeys
• Examine why some desist earlier than others
• Identify structural, social, and individual supports (or barriers) to desistance
• Co-design community-informed strategies to support long-term change

Key Research Questions

1. What factors do early desisters identify as contributing to their desistance?
2. What factors do late desisters identify?
3. How do these factors compare across groups?
4. What supports do young people believe would help others desist from offending?

Theoretical Frameworks

The study draws on established desistance theories, including:

• Moffitt’s developmental taxonomy
• Sampson and Laub’s age-graded theory of informal social control
•  Giordano et al.’s cognitive transformation theory
• Maruna’s concept of "making good" and labelling theory
• Paternoster and Bushway’s identity theory of desistance

These frameworks shape the study’s focus on turning points, identity transformation, and the influence of culturally meaningful supports on long-term desistance. In addition, the research is informed by critical perspectives that foreground structural inequality, racialisation, and systemic exclusion, including insights from Critical Race Theory, intersectionality (Crenshaw), and decolonial thought (Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres).

Methodology

This is a qualitative, multi-phase study involving 23 in-depth interviews with African Australian young people aged 16–25. African Australians are those who primarily identify with African heritage, with the majority of participants in this study being of South Sudanese descent due to their overrepresentation in the youth justice system. While diverse in background, participants share common experiences shaped by lived exeperience, racialisation, migration, and systemic marginalisation within the Australian justice context.

Participants are drawn from four groups to capture a range of experiences:

• Custody Group – Currently in youth justice custody (Parkville and Cherry Creek precincts), representing early or transitional desister
• Early Desisters – Ceased offending shortly after justice involvemen
• Late Desisters – Continued offending into early adulthood before desistin
• Minimal Contact Group – Young people with similar socio-cultural backgrounds but little or no formal justice contact, enabling identification of protective factors such as family support and cultural continuity

In Phase Two, co-design workshops with young people and community leaders/organisations will be used to generate culturally grounded intervention strategies. These will be developed with the community, not for it, ensuring that lived experience, not external assumptions, drives the proposed solutions.

The project's greatest strength lies in its cultural relevance and decolonising methodology.