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84 Fed. Probation 38 (2020)
Redemption at a Correctional Turning Point: Public Support for Rehabilitation Ceremonies

handle is hein.journals/fedpro84 and id is 40 raw text is: 38 EEDERAL PROBATION Volume 84 Number 1 Leah C. Butler, Francis T Cullen, and Alexander L. Burton University of Cincinnati NEARLY TWO DECADES ago, Shadd Maruna (2001) transformed the study of life-course criminology with his classic Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives. For most of its existence, American criminology had focused on juve- nile delinquency (Cullen, 2011), assuming that crime peaked during the teen years and that most youths then experienced matu- rational reform as they aged out of crime (Matza, 1964). Starting in the 1990s, however, criminology experienced a major shift as understanding grew that a smaller but conse- quential group of chronic or career criminals continued to offend deep into adulthood (Laub, 2004). Crime across the life course became a central criminological concern, as major works focused on criminal persis- tence and desistance during this stage in life. Prominent scholars debated the causal impor- tance of adult social bonds (Sampson & Laub, 1993), the existence of distinct developmental pathways (Moffitt, 1993), and the effects of stable individual propensities (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990). The intellectual ferment thus was already high when Maruna added another insight: What offenders thought about them- selves and their future shaped their capacity to avoid crime and make good in life (see also Giordano, Cernkovich, & Rudolph, 2002; Paternoster & Bushway, 2009). Maruna's novel perspective was based on his work as the co-director of the Liverpool Desistance Study in which he interviewed 65 persistent offenders. The members of his sample all had multiple criminogenic risk factors that predicted a destiny of continued law-breaking. Maruna observed, however, that despite similar backgrounds, some of his interviewees continued to offend whereas oth- ers did not. As he probed their lives in more detail, he discovered that a key distinguish- ing factor was their narrative identity-or the biographical stories they told about who they were and what their future might hold (McAdams, 2001). Maruna used the term of scripts to capture these self-stories. Thus, those who seemed trapped in a criminal life embraced what Maruna called a condemnation script: They saw themselves as doomed to deviance and condemned to a criminal life course by circumstances beyond their control. By contrast, those who embraced a redemption script believed that, although they had done bad things, they were not at their core a permanently bad person. Deep down they were good people;' so being a criminal was not their real me (Maruna, 2001, pp. 88-89). They would be made stron- ger by their past waywardness, becoming more resilient and being in a position to help others (e.g., juveniles) avoid their mistakes. This sense of self-efficacy and prosocial identity motivated them to surmount life's difficulties and to strive to make good in society. Importantly, Maruna's (2001) Angela J. Thielo University of Louisville Velmer S. Burton, Jr. University of Arkansas at Little Rock criminological theory of desistance led him to an important recommendation for cor- rectional policy. As labeling theory had long pointed out (Cullen & Cullen, 1978), stigmatization and exclusion from society made offender reform especially challenging (see also Braithwaite, 1989). More recently, attention has been paid to how a criminal record, now eternally available on the internet, exposes offenders to scores of col- lateral consequences that bar them from economic, social, and civic participation (see, e.g., Alexander, 2010; Burton, Fisher, Jonson, & Cullen, 2014; Jacobs, 2015; Pager, 2009). Those convicted of a crime thus face daunt- ing challenges in escaping their past from policies that, in effect, manifest a condemna- tion script for them. Maruna's (2001) views on redemption scripts led him to reject condemnation-what Garfinkle (1956) famously called degra- dation ceremonies-to offer a competing correctional policy: the implementation of formal rituals or ceremonies that would rec- ognize offender redemption (pp. 155-165). At the core of this policy is the premise that not only must a person accept conventional society in order to go straight, but conven- tional society must accept that person as well. True redemption-full acceptance back into society-thus requires more than the wayward being rehabilitated. As noted, even the most prosocial face many barriers to 38 FEDERAL PROBATION Volume 84 Number 1

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