‘Rolling dolo’: Desistance from delinquency and negative peer relationships over the early adolescent life-course

Although much of the literature on desistance has focused on late adolescence and early adulthood, little is known about how delinquent early adolescent African-American males develop strategies to desist from youth crime and violence during mid-early adolescence. Furthermore, there are few qualitative studies which examine the strategies delinquent black male youth use to negotiate neighborhood violence and the code of the street. This paper explores why some delinquent black male youth choose to maintain distal relationships or acquaintanceships with neighborhood peers as a safety strategy rather than forge relationships characterized by mutual obligation, trust and reciprocity. Youth define this strategy as ‘rolling dolo’. Drawing on three years of longitudinal ethnographic participant observations and interviews with 15 early adolescent African-American males (ages 12–16) living in a high-risk, low-income inner-city neighborhood in central Harlem, this paper qualitatively explores the meaning, practices and implications of the safety strategy of ‘rolling dolo’.