Missed Opportunities: Perspectives of Incarcerated Israeli Women and Men on Their Unsuccessful Desistance

The current study explores the factors that people incarcerated in Israeli prisons identify as contributing to their unsuccessful desistance. Twenty in-depth interviews were carried out with substance-involved men and women inmates. The findings showed that they faced subjective and sociostructural problems, reflecting interlocking axes of marginalization. However, the men and women constructed their narratives of unsuccessful desistance according to traditional gender roles: The men’s accounts were embedded in key concepts of masculinity such as unemployment, whereas the women’s accounts related to feminine notions such as motherhood. Possible implications for theory and intervention are discussed.