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

Incivility in public discussions has received increasing attention from academic and popular commentators in recent years. In an effort to better understand the nature and determinants of such incivility, this study examined a 3-week census of articles and comments posted to a local newspaper’s website—totaling more than 300 articles and 6,400 comments. The results of the content analysis show that incivility occurs frequently and is associated with key contextual factors, such as the topic of the article and the sources quoted within the article. We also find that, contrary to popular perceptions, frequent commenters are more civil than are infrequent commenters, and uncivil commenters are no less likely than civil commenters to use evidence in support of their claims.

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Online and Uncivil? Patterns and Determinants of Incivility in Newspaper Website Comments

Philoctetes was a good man and a good soldier. When he was on his way to Troy to fight alongside the Greeks, he had a terrible misfortune. By sheer accident he trespassed in a sacred precinct on the island of Lemnos. As punishment he was bitten on the foot by the serpent who guarded the shrine. His foot began to ooze with foul-smelling pus, and the pain made him cry out curses that spoiled the other soldiers' religious observances. They therefore left him alone on the island, a lame man with no resources but his bow and arrows, no friends but the animals who were also his food.Ten years later, according to Sophocles' version of the story, they come to bring him back: for they have learned that they cannot win the war without him. The leaders of the expedition think of Philoctetes as a tool of their purposes; they plan to trick him into returning, with no empathy for his plight. The Chorus of soldiers, however, has a different response. Even before they see the man, they imagine vividly what it is like to be him– and they enter a protest against the callousness of the commanders:For my part, I pity him– thinking of how, with no living soul to care for him, seeing no friendly face, wretched, always alone, he suffers with a fierce affliction, and has no resources to meet his daily needs. How in the world does the poor man survive?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0265052500001515

Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion

Teeming with chatrooms, online discussion groups, and blogs, the Internet offers previously unimagined opportunities for personal expression and communication. But theres a dark side to the story. A trail of information fragments about us is forever preserved on the Internet, instantly available in a Google search. A permanent chronicle of our private livesoften of dubious reliability and sometimes totally falsewill follow us wherever we go, accessible to friends, strangers, dates, employers, neighbors, relatives, and anyone else who cares to look. This engrossing book, brimming with amazing examples of gossip, slander, and rumor on the Internet, explores the profound implications of the online collision between free speech and privacy.Daniel Solove, an authority on information privacy law, offers a fascinating account of how the Internet is transforming gossip, the way we shame others, and our ability to protect our own reputations. Focusing on blogs, Internet communities, cybermobs, and other current trends, he shows that, ironically, the unconstrained flow of information on the Internet may impede opportunities for self-development and freedom. Long-standing notions of privacy need review, the author contends: unless we establish a balancebetweenprivacy and free speech, we may discover that the freedom of the Internet makes us less free. (11/01/2007)

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The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

Part I. Shame, Shame Management and Regulation: 1. Shame and shame management 2. The normative theory of shame 3. Revising the theory of reintegrative shaming 4. Just and loving gaze Part II. Shaming and Shame: Regulating Drink-Driving: 5. Shaming and shame 6. Three conceptual approaches to the emotion of shame 7. The reintegrative shaming experiments 8. Testing the dimentiality of shame 9. Testing the dimentiality of shaming 10. The relationship between shame and shaming 11. An ethical-identity conception of shame 12. Shame, shaming and criminal justice Part III. Shame Management: Regulating Bullying: 13. The bullying problem 14. The concept of shame management 15. The integrated model of shame management and bullying 16. Explaining bullying 17. Patterns of shame: bully, victim, bully/victim and non-bully/non-victim 18. Creating institutional spaces for shame management.

Shame Management through Reintegration

The resort to formal shaming as a criminal sanction is only one of several attempts to expand the sentencer's arsenal in an effective, inexpensive manner. Formal shaming, however, is perhaps the most sensational of these new penalties. It also exploits, in a particularly dramatic and explicit fashion, the assumed link between people's sense of shame and their tendency to observe legal norms. The purpose of this Article is to analyze whether this link is one that American criminal court judges can, or should, exploit.

Shame, Culture, and American Criminal Law

This article describes and critiques the recent revival of interest in shame and shaming in various contexts, including criminal punishment. In particular, it addresses criminal sanctions that require defendants to wear signs in public, or to otherwise advertise their convictions.The article begins with the work of culture critics who claim that Americans have become shameless in ways that undermine important social and legal goals. The author takes issue with these critics and warns against legal reforms based on their provocative but potentially destructive call to shame. The author argues that the culture critics tend to conflate three terms: shame, shaming, and shameful and explains why separation of these terms is crucial to meaningful discussions about whether Americans have "lost" their sense of shame or should be shamed for violating social or legal norms. The author then develops the psychological and the anthropological meanins of shame, uses this backdrop to evaluate all three terms, and speculates about the likely individual and social consequences of official shaming techniques. The insight of these materials is that shame is a sophisticated, context-sensitive, and potentially highly destructive emotion. Only in certain cultural settings is official shaming likely to prove an effective or humane method of enforcing norm observation. Finally, the author applies these insights to the use of shaming penalties by courts in criminal cases and concludes that American criminal courts may be ill-equipped to exploit offender or audience shame vulnerabilities in a way that makes practical or moral sense.

The Meanings of Shame: Implications for Legal Reform

The legal storytelling theme that is the focus of this symposium on legal narrative is part of a larger, ongoing intellectual movement. American legal scholarship of the past several decades has revealed deep dissatisfaction with the abstract and collective focus of law and legal discourse. The rebellion against abstraction has, of late, been characterized by a "call to context." One strand of this complex body of thought argues that law should concern itself more with the concrete lives of persons affected by it. One key word in the dialogue is the term "empathy," which appears frequently in the work of critical legal studies, feminist, and "law and literature" writers.This article was written not to reject or discredit this claim, but to suggest that the new terminology may not be helpful; to express several concerns about the limitations of the "call to context"; and to encourage a shift in focus to what I believe is the deeper malady that triggers the criticism that the law is "unempathetic" to individual needs. It focuses primarily on the application of the empathy, or "context," discourse to the work of judges, rather than to lawyers, legislators, or legal scholars.

Empathy, Legal Storytelling, and the Rule of Law: New Words, Old Wounds?

http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/law/3/4/645.pdf

The meanings of shame: Implications for Legal Reform

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Toni M. Massaro

Papers

Shame, Culture, and American Criminal Law

The Meanings of Shame: Implications for Legal Reform

Empathy, Legal Storytelling, and the Rule of Law: New Words, Old Wounds?

The meanings of shame: Implications for Legal Reform

Shame, Culture, and American Criminal Law