Kathryn J. Fox

Changing Violent Minds: Discursive Correction and Resistance in the Cognitive Treatment of Violent Offenders in Prison

Based upon observation in “Cognitive Self-Change” (CSC) treatment groups in a Vermont prison, this paper examines the dynamics of coercion and resistance in the cognitive social control of violent offenders. The program is mandated for violent offenders to correct the “cognitive distortions” that incite their violence. CSC relies upon particular constructions of criminal minds, responsibility, victimization, and choice that become the heart of rhetorical struggles between program facilitators and the inmates who resist the process of self-examination and change. CSC demonstrates Foucaults (1983) idea that dominant discourses (such as notions rooted in psychology) enact governmental power by encouraging self-reflection and self-regulation among citizens. Psychological paradigms about criminal personalities are imposed on inmates; their resistance to these concepts represents an opposing rhetoric and also demonstrates the subtly coercive context in which CSC takes place. Inmate objections are absorbed into and help sustain the dominant discourse about criminality. Examining the implications of coercion and resistance highlights the repressive potential in language.

Theorizing Community Integration as Desistance-Promotion

Recent criminological studies have focused on what promotes desistance from crime, ranging from internal promoters (such as narrative identity shift) to external promoters (such as employment and marriage). An understudied promoter is the role of ordinary community members in integrating released offenders into community life. This article draws on qualitative data collected from a Circles of Support and Accountability (CoSA) program in Vermont, which uses community volunteers to create a circle around selected medium-to-high risk offenders (often sex offenders) who present a risk for reoffense due to their isolation. The nature of the forged relationships is examined, and the article asserts that desistance can be achieved through the actions of community members who communicate a sense of shared moral space, and a genuine sense of belonging. By actively integrating offenders into community life, CoSA model normative lives, create normative and ordinary relationships of mutual obligation and respect, and aid in the de-labeling process by focusing on the other attributes of offenders beyond their criminality. This article concludes by theorizing the role of community integration as an antecedent to desistance, rather than an outcome. In so doing, our knowledge of offender reintegration and desistance processes can be more fully understood.

Restorative justice, offender rehabilitation and desistance

ABSTRACT This paper examines the conceptual distinctions between rehabilitation, restorative justice and desistance theories of offender cessation from crime. In this discussion, the overarching aim is to consider the place and utility of a restorative model as a recidivism reduction tool, while explaining the notional differences between ethical normative, prudential normative, and social normative models of restorative justice, rehabilitation and desistance respectively.

Civic commitment: Promoting desistance through community integration:

Why people desist from crime has been a popular topic among criminologists over the past decade or more. Debate continues about the relative importance of external or internal factors in contributing to desistance. Both sides agree that social dimensions affect desistance. This article argues that the social role of the larger community of ordinary citizens in integrating offenders has been under-theorized and untapped. Drawing upon qualitative interview data from a Circles of Support and Accountability program, I describe and analyze the nature of the relationships formed between released offenders and community volunteers who support them in their reintegration efforts. After a period of developing trust, the team creates a sense of mutual obligation, which thereby establishes the group’s moral authority, similar to the “family model” advocated by Braithwaite. Such a strengths-based and inclusive model of reentry contrasts with much of the correctional rehabilitation discourse that concentrates on offender re-offense risks and their management.

Restoring the social: offender reintegration in a risky world

How to manage and reintegrate offenders released from prison is a vexing problem for governments. The challenge of reintegration has forced a pendulum shift in corrections toward a more social-psychological understanding of the nature of offender release, after decades of purely psychological paradigm dominance. This article explains how reentry problems and practice encompass the shift in a context of a risk-centric and averse public. New reentry models such as Circles of Support and Accountability demonstrate an approach to reentry that draws upon the tenets of restorative justice and desistance theories. Using qualitative data on reintegration within New Zealand, this article contributes to our understanding of the problems for correctional departments to facilitate reintegration in the context of risk managerialism, and theorizes about the dimensions and implications of “restorative reentry.”

Second Chances: A Comparison of Civic Engagement in Offender Reentry Programs

Mass incarceration has led to a host of problems for reentering offenders and the communities to which they return. The federal government has provided funds to states to address the problems associated with returning offenders. In Vermont, corrections partnered with local community justice centers to develop offender reentry programs. These took various forms but focused on support and services for offenders while enforcing accountability and community safety. This article analyzes three reentry program models and outlines their designs’ ability to enact Bazemore and Stinchcomb’s (2004) notion of a ‘‘civic engagement model of reentry.’’ The vexing challenges of mobilizing communities to foster reintegration for returning offenders are discussed.

Contextualizing the Policy and Pragmatics of Reintegrating Sex Offenders

As sanctions for those convicted of sex offenses have increased over recent years, the risk for reoffense presented by social isolation increases. Because most jurisdictions struggle with how best to manage and reintegrate sex offenders, this study analyzes bureaucratic and contextual issues with arranging community-based reintegration programs. Specifically, this qualitative, process-oriented study examines and compares Circles of Support & Accountability (CoSA) programs from the United States (specifically, Vermont) and New Zealand. CoSAs provide support for medium- to high-risk sex offenders as they are released to communities. The programs are compared with regard to their structures, the relationship to Corrections, the role of communities, and core members’ reentry challenges. The implications of each configuration are explored. As most of the existing research on CoSAs is focused on recidivism, and as the U.S. federal government is expanding the use of CoSA, this article fills a void in our understanding of the role that communities can play in reintegrating sexual offenders and how program structures shape reentry.

Redeeming Communities: Restorative Offender Reentry in a Risk-Centric Society

Abstract Released prisoners present problems for communities to manage. The federal governments prisoner reentry initiative funded states (beginning in 2001 and again in 2008) to develop reentry projects. Vermont utilized its existing municipal community justice apparatus to create reentry programs which involve community members in providing support for returning offenders. Using qualitative data analysis, this paper examines the extent to which the Vermont programs embody Bazemore and Marunas (2009) concept of “restorative reentry.” Specifically, this paper explores the dual missions of restorative justice and reintegration. In conclusion, the context of a risk-centric society is explored as creating special complications for reintegration processes.

Trying to Restore Justice Bureaucracies, Risk Management, and Disciplinary Boundaries in New Zealand Criminal Justice

New Zealand is well known for its restorative justice conferences in the youth justice system. However, restorative justice has yet to overwhelm the adult criminal justice system. Based on interviews in New Zealand with correctional staff, restorative justice providers, and others, this article explores the reason for the modest inroads that restorative practice has made, and suggests that the general context may explain the limits of restorative justice in other places. The article argues that bureaucratic silos make it challenging to determine if restorative practice might fit within a rehabilitation or reintegration framework. In addition, because of the dominance of psychological modes for assessing and treating criminal behavior, an overarching preoccupation with risk management orients correctional practice toward treatment. Moreover, restorative justice’s affiliation with victims’ perspectives has made its placement within offender reintegration difficult to imagine. Finally, the penal populism that frames correctional practice in New Zealand, and other Anglophone countries, makes alternative to punishment harder to sell. However, the current liminal state of correctional practice creates an opportunity to conceive of more humanistic ways of repairing the harm caused by crime.

Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean-Living Youth, and Social Change

country like Nicaragua in the mid-1990s speaks to some key questions in the theoretical debates regarding globalization, the global hegemony of neoliberalism, and women’s organizing in post-socialist contexts. These include what it means to organize and support women workers as both women and workers and what kinds of local, national, and transnational struggles result when women are increasingly incorporated into the highly gendered terrain of the neo-liberal, post-colonial global economy. They also include the ways in which power and other inequities, particularly those based on gender, shape transnational politics and present social movement actors with “daunting obstacles” as well as “surprising opportunities” (p. 7). On another level, the book is a case study of women’s organizing in a transnational context where “[g]lobal discourses, such as human rights, and global trends, such as transitions to neoliberal democracies and the accompanying importance of national discourses of rights and citizenship” shape strategic orientations and inform organizational practices (p. 5). In one sense, the MEC is unique in that it is the only organization in the country that applies a gender perspective in its efforts to organize and meet the needs of maquila workers. On the other hand, its experiences can be seen as representative of the process of democratic transition that is going on in Central America and elsewhere in the developing world and, by implication, the challenges faced by and opportunities available to social justice movements. MEC’s formation and existence is undergirded by transnational linkages with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and solidarity groups in Europe and North America and its ability to lobby state officials and negotiate with factory owners in Nicaragua draws on these transnational links for leverage. On yet another level, the study is an illuminating example of the methodological challenges of attempting to understand globalization from the grassroots perspective. Guided by the research strategy of “global ethnography,” the author uses local participant observation to theorize “the global” under the assumption that local and global are not separate realms, but part of the same reality. In this approach, micro-level processes are viewed as an expression of the macro and local movements situated within a “global here and now” and “strategically situated” within a national globalized political economy as seen as influenced by and influencing macro-level globalization processes. Participant observation turned out to be a much more fruitful data collection strategy than individual or group structured interviews, Bickham Mendez reports, because the women organizers and participants were unaccustomed to analyzing their own biographies and engaging in deliberate self-reflection, the “language of identity,” with its Western individualist assumptions, was not a good match. She concludes with the experiences and perspectives of MEC participants. The clumsiness and artificial formality of the interviews as a methodological tool actually obstructed, she contends, her ability to understand what the Nicaraguan women organizers were trying to tell her about their organizing perspectives. The theoretical and methodological richness of this study is matched by some interesting and practical implications for transnational organizing, inside and outside of the academy, discussed at the end of the book. Among these are the need of organizers to appear local enough, yet at the same time they are sophisticated enough to negotiate funding from the global arena. This well-written, well-organized and accessible book is exemplary in its ability to locate a case study within a larger context and reveal the connections between day-today organizing and the transnational links and multiple global spheres stimulated by globalization.