Maruna, Shadd: Redemption Scripts and Desistance

Observers of politics and popular culture are likely familiar with the idea of the habitual offender: the criminal with a long record of past offenses. Political platforms and fictional plot lines often focus attention on the super-predator and the career criminal, dramatizing the notion that crime is intractable and offenders unchangeable. A powerful fact of criminology, however, is that virtually all criminals—including those with long and serious histories of criminal involvement—eventually stop committing crime (Blumstein & Cohen, 1987; Farrington, 1992). This process of abstaining from crime is referred to as desistance.

Although much of criminology is concerned with explaining why people commit crime, or why they continue to commit crime (a process referred to as persistence), there is good reason to ask why people desist from crime. Not only is desistance the most likely outcome, but there is also a strong public interest in understanding the factors that make desistance more or less likely. Annually in the United States, for example, more than 700,000 inmates are released from prison (Sabol & Couture, 2008) and another 2 million are released from probation supervision (Glaze & Bonczar, 2007). As a matter of public safety, it is important to facilitate the process of desistance and avoid official actions that make it more difficult for people to abstain from crime.

In Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives, Shadd Maruna proposes a theory to explain how people with long and serious records of criminal involvement turn their lives around and desist from crime. Maruna's work is identified with a branch of criminology known as life-course criminology, which is concerned with understanding how and why patterns of criminal involvement change over the course of individuals’ lives. Maruna proposes that ex-convicts have a lot to explain—to themselves and to others. They need a story that helps make sense of their criminal past and assert convincingly their reform. “[E]x-offenders … need a logical self-story to help them deal with their own feelings of culpability, external stigma, and the potential emptiness and void of their lives” (p. 55). Moreover, Maruna suggests that these self-stories are instrumental in shaping behavior. How individuals respond to situations depends in part on interpretations and self-perceptions.

Based on a narrative analysis of the life stories of 20 active offenders and 30 desisting offenders [Page 575]from Liverpool, England, Maruna discovered that the stories interviewees told about themselves followed certain distinguishing patterns. Active offenders told stories that followed a condemnation script, a self-narrative characterized by a lack of personal agency, a sense that they had nothing left to lose, and a focus on the pursuit of happiness through consumption and material gain. Desisting offenders, in contrast, constructed a story to redeem themselves of their past and assert a meaningful future, a so-called redemption script.

The two groups of interviewees were carefully matched on characteristics related to criminality. In other words, the study participants shared remarkably similar backgrounds and future prospects: both groups were extensively involved in crime (usually from a young age), had poor employment records, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, grew up in “tough” neighborhoods with few legitimate economic opportunities, experienced physical and emotional abuse, and had spent significant amounts of time incarcerated and under criminal justice supervision. Interestingly, although they confronted similarly bleak prospects for success, the desisters managed to find a “tragic optimism” in their circumstances and an almost zealous hope for their future. In contrast, the active offenders “seemed fairly accurate in their assessment of their situation (dire), their chances of achieving success in the ‘straight’ world (minimal), and their place in mainstream society (‘need not apply‘)” (p. 9). The sections below takes a closer look at the concept of desistance from crime and provide a fuller explanation of condemnation and redemption scripts. Finally, the entry concludes by briefly exploring how knowledge of how people voluntarily “go straight” can inform efforts to support desistance from crime.

...