Offender Families as Victims and Their Role in Offender Reintegration

Ninety-five percent of all offenders are released, most of whom return to family members who have suffered greatly from their loved one\u27s criminal behavior; yet, research on their victimization and trauma is rare. Additionally, families anticipate a role in the offender\u27s reintegration; however, little research has explored their own recovery and insights on their reintegrative efforts. This qualitative phenomenological study sought to discover a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of 13 offender family members in Texas. Participants were recruited through community organizations and selected through a purposeful sampling strategy to ensure diversity. The data were collected through screening and face-to-face interviews and analyzed through iterative hand coding and thematic development, supported by secondary coding review and participant verification. Concepts explored included victimization within a trauma-informed environment, whereby support systems understand the impact of trauma on individuals and reintegration within a restorative justice model, which aims to restore individual and community trust. Results found that participants voiced consistent themes of victimization, presented effective coping mechanisms and overall continued relationships with friends, family members, and the community. Findings also showed that participants anticipated roles of both emotional and instrumental support and reported an interest in their involvement with a restorative justice option for the offender upon his reentry. The findings draw no definitive conclusions on the degree of family member victimization but do promote social change for developing policies that collaboratively engage family members within the judicial and reentry process to reduce recidivism

Narrative and the afterlife in modern fiction the meanings of life after death

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Writing Facts: Interdisciplinary Discussions of a Key Concept in Modernity

"Fact" is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering "writing facts" and "writing facts", the volume shows why and how "facts" are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity

Writing Facts

»Fact« is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering »writing facts« and »writing facts«, the volume shows why and how »facts« are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity

Mothering from the inside: narratives of motherhood and imprisonment

Two thirds of the 4,000 women who are in prison in England and Wales are mothers of dependent children. Imprisonment can severely alter, disrupt or even terminate mothering. However, there is a relative absence of empirical research within this area. Therefore, we know little of the meaning of mothering and motherhood for women in prison. The main aim of this research was to explore the way in which women in prison make sense of motherhood and construct their mothering identity. To achieve this, the analytical framework of biographical disruption was adopted and adapted; replacing chronic illness as the critical event with imprisonment. The study was underpinned by a narrative methodology to focus upon the ways in which the narratives of mothers in prison are constructed/ reconstructed and presented. In depth narrative interviews were conducted with 16 women. The interviews lasted between forty five minutes and three hours. The interviews were recorded, transcribed and then analysed using the Listening Guide. On the basis of those interviews, three different narratives were constructed, the Wounded Mother, the Unbecoming Mother and the Suspended Mother. The findings of this research illustrate that the relationship between imprisonment and biographical disruption is multi-faceted. Mothering identities can be fundamentally threatened, yet can also be reinforced. This research has also highlighted that it is often the compounding impact of repeated disruptions, culminating in prison that represents the most profound disruption to the mothering identities of women in prison. The implications of the research for policy and practice are also considered

Backward C inside a Circle: Free Culture in Zines

Although zines made today utilize many forms of antiquated technologies such as the typewriter and the photocopier in their construction, they are a part of contemporary tinkering with intellectual property. This thesis examines free culture as it has been expressed in self-published zines made in the last thirty-five years. It looks at the licenses found in zines as conversations between a zine maker and a zine reader. Beyond just the legal implications, the cultural and ethical effects of licensing a zine are explored. The internet is not the only place where people have played with intellectual property and toyed with alternatives to copyright. Outside thinking about digital copying, this thesis highlights ways that the use and remixing of the others\u27 work in print is a part of the free culture movement. It looks beyond the technological to uncover other forms of anti-copyright activism

Experience on trial: criminal law and the modernist novel

The cultural forms of modernity become truly modern only when specific experience, as opposed to tradition or faith, is made the basis of epistemological authority. By taking the primary examples of law and literature, this thesis argues that the criminal trial and realist novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries perfectly conform to this statement. But by the early twentieth-century, experience had, as Walter Benjamin put it, ‘fallen in value’. As such, the modernist novel and trial come to have foundations in a non-experience which nullifies identity, subverts repetition and supplants presence with absence. The philosophical basis of experience, its fundamental basis within the novel and trial, and the theoretical manifestations of its dissolving, are outlined in the substantial Introduction to this thesis. Chapter One then specifically examines E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) within the context of the administration of justice in British India. Adela Quested’s supposed assault within the Marabar cave is argued to be a non-event which in no way conforms to the modern sense of experience outlined in the Introduction. This resonates with the state of the trial in British India, in which many magistrates became convinced of the rampant perjury of the natives, turning their decisions into a matter of deciding between the less untrue of two false accounts. Like the non-event in the Marabar cave, the crime that was supposedly at the heart of the trial, the experience at its core, was thus slipping from view. In the second part of Chapter One, it is argued that in his theoretical work, Aspects of the Novel (1927), Forster, responding to anxieties about the novel’s experiential loss, attempted to codify the laws of the realism. This project had much in common with the Acts of legal codification that took place in British India in the 1860s and ‘70s, particularly that of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen’s Indian Evidence Act 1872, which sought to retain a form of representation that was congruent with a traditional conception of experience, thus safeguarding judgment. In Chapter Two, Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) is analysed in the light of legal developments in expert witnessing and criminal identification. One of the specific issues of Ford’s novel is the kind of identity it portrays. Without commensurable experiences that can be reasonably assimilated and communicated, the identities of The Good Soldier resist the common recognition of a realist character. Legal developments in the attribution of responsibility and the identification of criminals are argued to parallel the methods by which Ford’s ‘Literary Impressionism’, by contrast, provides the image of his actors. In many ways, these issues were matters for expert witnesses, a growing number of whom were taking the stand in British courts. By taking judgment out of the hand of the layman, expertise was supplanting experience. But this was not limited to the legal forum – in the final part of Chapter Two it is suggested that Ford’s novel, itself, responds to a sense of expert reading. Chapter Three discusses Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913-1927) in connection to two points of legal interest. Firstly, the Dreyfus case, which, in its reliance upon absent evidence parallels the denigration of presence that exists in Proust’s novel. Secondly, Dreyfus’ supporters, in calling for a re-trial, asked for a certain form of repetition to take place. The repetitious legal forms of review, appeal, and precedent are then examined in relation to the various forms of repetition that exist within Proust’s work. By utilising Platonic, Nietzschean, and Freudian theories of repetition, it is argued that experience has truly fallen in value when the origins of repetition can be only obliquely discerned. In the Conclusion, the continuity of a realist tradition, and a modernist impulse of non-experience, will be traced in contemporary works – Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) and The Staircase (2005), a documentary film by Jean-Xavier De Lestrade about a real murder trial in North Carolina. Finally, a view is offered of the future of experience in the novel and courtroom: one which, based upon John D. Caputo’s reading of Jacques Derrida’s work, stresses the ethical nature of doing truth and making reality in the very act of allowing experience to slip away

Writing Facts

»Fact« is one of the most crucial inventions of modern times. Susanne Knaller discusses the functions of this powerful notion in the arts and the sciences, its impact on aesthetic models and systems of knowledge. The practice of writing provides an effective procedure to realize and to understand facts. This concerns preparatory procedures, formal choices, models of argumentation, and narrative patterns. By considering »writing facts« and »writing facts«, the volume shows why and how »facts« are a result of knowledge, rules, and norms as well as of description, argumentation, and narration. This approach allows new perspectives on »fact« and its impact on modernity