Desistenza dal crimine e discontinuità biografiche: un’analisi dinamica di percorsi di vita di giovani adulti

In the chapter, a discussion is presented concerning a sample of young people who tend to get out of a deviant life path thanks to the strong 'discontinuity' represented by a prison sentence and by being entrusted to social services. The authors succeed in bringing out the process through which an experience - that of punishment - is articulated, i.e. lived and interpreted by the subjects, with the facilitation of a social worker. One can thus see how the articulation of the experience (supported by a social worker) can bring out a reflexivity that is not fractured, which instead characterised many of these young people before entering the transition phase. This also constitutes an important bridgehead for future research: to study how the figure of the 'reflexive' social worker can become a pivot for an important biographical change. Reflexive, here, means that the social worker must evidently call upon strong symbolic resources of his own, but also that his role becomes eminently that of a promoter, of a coach of the fractured or blocked reflexivity of the young people he follows.