Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

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

Symposium Review: 25th Anniversary of Moral Boundaries by Joan Tronto

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.

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The Politics of Life Itself

The article offers a descriptive analysis of strategies of crime control in contemporary Britain and elsewhere. It argues that the normality of high crime rates and the limitations of criminal justice agencies have created a new predicament for governments. The response to this predicament has been recurring ambivalence that helps explain the volatile and contradictory character of recent crime control policy. The article identifies adaptive strategies (responsibilization, defining deviance down, and redefining organizational success) and strategies of denial (the punitive sovereign response), as well as the different criminologies that accompany them.

THE LIMITS OF THE SOVEREIGN STATE Strategies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society

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.

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

The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court

1. Introduction Part I. The Case of Judicial Prison Reform: 2. An overview of judicial prison reform 3. Two classic prison reform cases: Arkansas and Texas 4. Three variations on a theme: the Colorado penitentiary, the Santa Clara county jails and Marion penitentiary Part II. The Theory of Judicial Policy-Making: 5. Defining the problem, identifying the goal, and rejecting the principle of federalism 6. Creating doctrine, choosing solutions and transforming the rule of law 7. Implementing the solution, muddling through and ignoring the separation of powers principle 8. Conclusion 9. CODA: assessing the successes of judicial prison reform.

Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons

Richard Posner, Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, once began a review of an earlier effort in law-and-economics-essentially an economic assessment of our system of tort law-by noting \"Torts is not my field.\"' Nor is it mine, arid I must enter the same disclaimer as to contracts, crimes, antitrust, regulated industries, corporations, taxation, constitutional law, civil procedure, and other of the areas covered in Economic Analysis of Law. (Of course, many of these are not Posner's \"fields\" either, wherein may lie a problem with his book-at least in the eyes of some.) A review of this book in the usual fashion of book reviews-were it to be done competently-would require the efforts of a committee, for its treatment is broad, if not uniformly deep. The committee, moreover, would need economists as well as legal scholars from diverse interests among its membership. Posner's command of economics, so far as I am able to judge, goes well beyond mere familiarity or competence, and his use of economic analysis in the book--despite efforts to simplify and reduce2 -is hardly casual or undemanding.

Malcolm M Feeley

Papers

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

The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court

Judicial Policy Making and the Modern State: How the Courts Reformed America's Prisons

Economic Analysis of Law

The Process is the Punishment