After the offence: The construction of crime and its consequences by families of serious offenders.

This thesis examines the experiences of relatives of those accused or convicted of serious offences such as murder, manslaughter, rape and sex offences. Relatives' accounts focus on the discovery of the offence as traumatic and life-changing, comparable in many ways to bereavement. Accounts of life before this point polarised and were either problem-identifying or normalising. Participants passed through several stages after discovering the offence as they began to feel they were coping and as the criminal justice process progressed. Responsibilities within the family were renegotiated and new responsibilities emerged which particularly revolved around the offender and his or her needs. Female relatives, and primarily mothers and wives, tended to take on these new tasks. Relatives experience secondary stigma because of their kin relationship to a serious offender, but this is more than just a stigma by association. Relatives are themselves subject to a 'web of shame' on the basis of contamination and blame. The thesis explores the accounts that relatives construct about the offence and about their own actions. When accounting for the offence, relatives were found to use 'actor adjustments' and 'act adjustments' of various types. Many participants were searching around for reasons and trying to understand why the offence had happened; formulating these accounts was part of that process. The thesis considers why relatives use self-help and what it offers. It is argued that self-help provides a 'collective narrative' for understanding experience which relatives use as a resource along with other sources to understand their circumstances. Most participants in the research were female, as are most participants in self-help services for relatives of offenders, and reasons for this are considered. The thesis is based upon in-depth interviews with 32 relatives of serious offenders and participant observation of a self-help organisation for families of serious offenders over several years

The evolution of soundscores for improvisers

Musicians who improvise engage with the space and each other through listening. Listening is a complex process of perception in which sound enters the body through the ears and resonates inward and outward-connecting body, mind, and spirit with environment, culture, and history. Soundscores use recordings of contemporary soundscapes to activate improvisation. These recordings, made in locations where nature and modern culture intersect, are brought into a traditional concert hall setting through speakers and/or headphones to engage musicians. Soundscores differ from other improvised scores, such as graphic or instructional scores, because they do not require that the performer translate visual stimulus into sound. Rather, they use sound to inspire sound. The live performance of music offers time and a dedicated space for connection to real spaces through listening, which can be both personal and communal in nature. Soundscores make use of sound's ability to penetrate inner and outer spaces to connect listeners to their environment as well as to themselves and each other. Soundscores have evolved from my own listening: to history, to culture and strive to extend my listening through the creation of shared listening spaces. In the performance of a Soundscore, the interaction between the score, the improvisers and the audience enables new listening perspectives to be perceived. Soundscores invite a chain of listeners--from composer to performer to audience--to participate in a shared listening space, where layers of listening experiences bridge internal and external, as well as real and imagined spaces and offer new perspectives of our selves, each other and the world we inhabit. Please note: an audio CD containing examples of several pieces detailed in The Evolution of Soundscores for Improvisers is available in the Mills College Library Archive

Conceptualizing the effects of imprisonment on families: Collateral consequences, secondary punishment, or symbiotic harms?

This article explores how we might best understand the effects of imprisonment on families and why this is important to a full understanding of prison as a form of punishment. The effects on families have broadly been understood within previous literature in one of two ways: either as ‘collateral consequences’, or as a form of secondary punishment extended to the family member. We suggest that the first of these descriptions is at best insufficient and at worst subordinating and marginalizing, while the second is inaccurate when family members have not committed an offence. We offer instead the concept of ‘symbiotic harms’ which we define as negative effects that flow both ways through the interdependencies of intimate associations such as kin relationships. The characteristics of these harms can be more fully described by a term which encompasses their relational, mutual, non-linear, agentic, and heterogeneous properties