Description: Based on interviews with randomly selected former offenders, this book takes a fresh look at the course and nature of crime. It cuts across theorising, trying to understand what people actually experience, why they do what they do, and to get a picture of successful change. As the Justice Department's Centennial Fellow, Dr Leibrich tracked down fifty offenders who had been sentenced to supervision in 1987 and not reoffended three years later. She asked them why not. The people who participated in the interviews did so because they wanted to, and their stories make this a moving piece of research. The author soon found that 'going straight' was 'curved' - that the people she interviewed did not fall into such neat categories as 'straight' and 'crooked'. Her methodology (which she describes in detail in the appendices) needed to grapple with the many subtleties of her material and drew on different kinds of research strategies, utilising their strengths. In an exciting account of her approach to problem-solving on the basis of trial and error, and intuition, the reader gains insight into the personal experience of the research process, the pitfalls and highlights, the frustration and anxiety of data collection - 'Will I find Trinity? Is the guy I'm going to meet really okay? Do I include people who have reoffended? Does my write-up reflect people's real experience?' The result, this book, is tight and rigorous in its analysis, but does justice to the richness and warmth of the data, valuing the words and actions of the people who participated in the study.

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