Can hardened criminals really reform? "Making Good" provides resounding proof that the answer is yes. This book provides a fascinating narrative analysis of the lives of repeat offenders who, by all statistical measures, should have continued on the criminal path but instead have created lives of productivity and purpose. This examination of the phenomenology of "making good" includes an encyclopedic review of the literature on personal reform as well as a practical guide to the use of narratives in offender counseling and rehabilitation.The author's research shows that criminals who desist from crime have constructed powerful narratives that aided them in making sense of their pasts, finding fulfillment in productive behaviors, and feeling in control of their future. Borrowing from the field of narrative psychology, Maruna argues that to truly understand offenders, we must understand the stories that they tell - and that in turn this story-making process has the capacity to transform lives. "Making Good" challenges some of the cherished assumptions of various therapy models for offenders and supports new paradigms for offender rehabilitation. This groundbreaking book is a must read for criminologists, forensic psychologists, lawyers, rehabilitation counselors, or anyone interested in the generative process of change.

Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives

Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rsocp/n20/n20a15.pdf

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

The Political Consciousness of Post-Industrialism@@@The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics.

The new penology argues that an important new language of penology is emerging. This new language, which has its counterparts in other areas of the law as well, shifts focus away from the traditional concerns of the criminal law and criminology, which have focused on the individual, and redirects it to actuarial consideration of aggregates. This shift has a number of important implications: It facilitates development of a vision or model of a new type of criminal process that embraces increased reliance on imprisonment and that merges concerns for surveillance and custody, that shifts away from a concern with punishing individuals to managing aggregates of dangerous groups, and that affects the training and practice of criminologists.

/pdf/the-new-penology-notes-on-the-emerging-strategy-of-3w9dj9gzz1.pdf

The New Penology : Notes on the emerging strategy of corrections and its implications

The biological existence of human beings has become political in novel ways. The object, target and stake of this new 'vital' politics are human life itself. The contemporary state does not 'nationalize' the corporeality of its subjects into a body politic on which it works en masse, in relation to the body politics of other states competing in similar terms. Biopolitics addresses human existence at the molecular level: it is waged about molecules, amongst molecules, and where the molecules themselves are at stake. Human beings in contemporary Western culture are increasingly coming to understand themselves in somatic terms – corporeality has become of the most important sites for ethical judgements and techniques. Biopolitics was inextricably bound up with the rise of the life sciences, the human sciences, clinical medicine. It has given birth to techniques, technologies, experts and apparatuses for the care and administration of the life of each and all, from town planning to health services.

/pdf/the-politics-of-life-itself-4278mv6s8b.pdf

The Politics of Life Itself

Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear

This book reveals how modern strategies of punishment - and, by all accounts, their failure - relate to political and economic transformations in society at large. Jonathan Simon uses the practice of parole in California as a window to the changing historical understanding of what a corrections system does and how it works. When parole first emerged as a corrections strategy in the 19th century, work was supposed to keep ex-prisoners out of trouble. What followed was a rehabilitative strategy, where the clinical expertise of the parole agent replaced the discipline of the industrial labour market in controlling criminal deviance. Today, Simon argues, as the economy has virtually locked out an entire class, rehabilitation has given way to mere management. The result is an escalating cycle of imprisonment, destabilization, and insecurity. No improvement in the current penal crisis can be expected until we better understand the relationship between punishment and social order, which this book explores in theoretical, historical, and practical detail.

Poor discipline : parole and the social control of the underclass, 1890-1990

After more than four decades, governing through crime has fundamentally altered American democracy, forging profound changes in the institutions of democracy: legislative; executive; and judicial. The emergence of the modern democratic state coincided with the emergence of crime as a 'social problem' and the emergence of criminology as a science of criminal behavior and an expert adjunct of state power in the nineteenth century. Land legislation in the nineteenth century reflected a master strategy for fostering democracy and for governing. The transformation of US political and legal institutions around the problem of crime has also moved into civil institutions such as the family, schools, and workplace. In opposition to the country's founding tenets and to the interests of the human being, the impulse to power that characterizes established governments has manifested in a complex, entrenched, and uncontrolled pattern in the United States, of governing through crime.

Governing through Crime

Sex offenders were once taken to be exemplary of the underlying psychopathological basis of crime Today their significance is very different Rather than occasions for testing our modernist faith in scientific rationality, they have become a lesson in the intransigence of evil Recent laws aimed at addressing sex offenders reflect a transformation in the penal process that has been called the “new penology” This new penology sees crime as a problem of managing high-risk categories and subpopulations, not normalizing individuals to community norms Kansas v Hendricks and recent cases upholding the constitutionality of “Megan's Law” open a window into the operation of the new penology and reveal the degree to which its features are largely immune from constitutional limits established by judicial review

Jonathan Simon

Papers

The New Penology : Notes on the emerging strategy of corrections and its implications

Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear

Poor discipline : parole and the social control of the underclass, 1890-1990

Governing through Crime

Managing the monstrous: Sex offenders and the new penology.