‘Mate, you gone legit?’: Tension and loss in status and desistance

Abstract This article introduces the concept of status collapse—the symbolic and existential loss experienced by working-class men during desistance from crime. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography, the authors explore how status, as symbolic capital and embodied recognition, shapes both criminal persistence and the challenges of transitioning to prosocial life. While desistance theory has emphasized cognitive and relational change, this article highlights the underexplored cost of losing criminalized identities that once conferred meaning, belonging, and social standing. The authors develop the concept of Desistance Habitus to describe how symbolic capital from street and carceral contexts can be reconfigured in prosocial terrains. They call for justice interventions that offer not just relational support but meaningful status reconstruction.