Psychological Jurisprudence,Normative Philosophy,and Trans-Desistance Theory

Abstract

For more than two decades, the diagnostic and cultural insights of psychological jurisprudence (PJ) have informed social theory, clinical practice, and public policy. As a form of heterodox criticism, PJ probes the relationship between human agency and social structure, and it examines how both are informed by and co-produce extant reality. This article explores the utility of PJ—especially as a basis to reconfigure the problem of crime, to redefine institutional responses to it, and to reconceive the process of desistance. To accomplish this objective, the article addresses two issues. First, it explains how the diagnostic and cultural footing of PJ functions as philosophical critique concerning the subject of crime. Second, it demonstrates how this critique represents the grounding of an ethic with considerable relevance for developing a normative theory of trans-desistance. The article concludes by suggesting how the normative dimensions of trans-desistance portend dynamic change for future criminal justice practice and mental health treatment.

Keywords

crime psychological jurisprudence normative philosophy trans-desistance theory society of captives criminal justice practice mental health treatment

Psychological jurisprudence (PJ) is a cross-disciplinary approach to diagnostic inquiry and cultural critique (Birgden, 2014). The diagnosis and critique provide a unique assessment of subjectivity (i.e., the in-and-of-society self; the social person). This assessment explains the influencing presence of aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, and ontology in the constitution of subjectivity. In the theory of PJ, these presences are said to be interactive, mutually supporting, and co-productive (Arrigo, Bersot, & Sellers, 2011). Stated differently, these influences powerfully, although often pre-reflectively, contribute to subjectivity’s assemblage (Deleuze, 1983) and structuration (i.e., co-constitution; Giddens, 1986). Regrettably, academic criminologists, mental health treatment specialists, community workers, and public policy analysts often fail to consider how the assembling of these presences both co-shapes and factors into the official problem of crime (Henry & Milovanovic, 1996), the construction of institutionally certified responses to offender behavior (Crewe, 2013), and the prescribed process of desistance (e.g., Farrall & Calverley, 2006).

As a form of philosophical dissent, PJ has demonstrated considerable resilience. In recent years, it has been used to further socio-legal theory (Arrigo, 2011b), to redirect clinical acumen (Arrigo, 2013a), to advance institutional best practices (Bersot & Arrigo, 2011; Sellers & Arrigo, 2009), and to promote public policy reform (Trull & Arrigo, in press). These efforts demonstrate how PJ’s diagnostic analysis and cultural criticism represent an original, sensible, and timely approach to ameliorating human social problems, especially those that are situated at the crossroads of criminal justice practice and mental health treatment (Birgden, 2014). Indeed, as Ward (2013) observed when describing the relevance of PJ,

[It is composed of] significant epistemological, economic, social, cultural, psychological, and ethical strands [reminding us] that we are under the spell of . . . contestable, and specific [renditions of reality] . . . . The crucial issue is [one of diagnosing] the relationship [among those cultural forces] . . . that reinforce, and in a sense constitute, [finite depictions of subjectivity]. By understanding how these factors dynamically interact . . . it may be possible to open up a conceptual space for considering alternative ways of dealing with atypical human behavior. (p. 704)

What has yet to be assessed by proponents of PJ is how its clinical diagnostics and cultural criticism provide the grounding of a normative philosophy with considerable relevance for developing a trans-desistance theory in offender treatment.¹ As subsequently made evident, this theory reconfigures the response to crime, redefines its institutional curatives and correctives, and reconceives the process (i.e., the method) of desistance. Indeed, this is a theory that dramatically recasts the subject of crime. As proposed herein, trans-desistance endorses the view that “to desist from crime, ex-offenders need to develop a coherent, pro-social identity for themselves” (Maruna, 2001, p. 8). As such, this article explains how the philosophy of PJ can be used to recognize the offender, to reconstruct the social person’s identity, and to readdress the subject of crime. First, I summarize how PJ functions as both a form of diagnostic inquiry and as a type of cultural criticism. Second, I describe how the diagnostic insights and cultural dimensions of PJ form the bases of an underlying ethic whose values are consistent with and relevant for developing a normative theory of trans-desistance. I conclude by tentatively proposing how these collective observations portend a new and much-needed direction in offender recovery and transformation with wholesale reformist implications for future criminal justice practice and mental health treatment.

Psychological Jurisprudence: Clinical Diagnostics and Cultural Criticism

PJ represents a radical perspective and a heterodox critique whose object of inquiry is human social capital (Marx, 1993) or the productivity of subjectivity (Deleuze, 1983). As philosophy, PJ is rooted in the continental rather than the analytic tradition (Arrigo, 2012). The continental tradition rejects excessive reliance on empiricism or scientism as the only basis to explain phenomena (Crewe, 2013). Moreover, it emphasizes historicism (i.e., the importance of symbols and signs, languages and codes, practices and customs) as a preferred method by which to account for the vagaries of possible experience (Arrigo & Milovanovic, 2009). Still further, it identifies prospects for human social change (e.g., restoration and transformation) as rooted in consciousness and its emancipation (Hardie-Bick & Lippens, 2011). And finally, it recognizes the socio-cultural embeddedness of knowledge, science, reality, and so on, especially within institutional decision making (Polizzi, Braswell, & Draper, 2014). Thus, the continental tradition yields a unique type of clinical diagnosis regarding the status of the human social project, and an alternative form of cultural criticism regarding the forces that forestall its progress or foreclose its possibilities. As philosophical dissent, PJ examines the complexities of phenomena such as the industries of madness and reason (Bersot & Arrigo, 2011), the trade in crime and responsibility (Sellers & Arrigo, 2009), and the politics of citizenship and social justice (Trull & Arrigo, in press) in ways not found in more positivistic analytical accounts.

The productivity of subjectivity occurs by harnessing and then unleashing untapped possibilities in human relatedness (Deleuze, 1983). These are the possibilities of being and becoming more fully human. These possibilities long for recognition, coherence, and legitimacy in and through the journey of desistance (Arrigo & Milovanovic, 2009). When made manifest, these protean relations of humanness represent nascent expressions of being and becoming for a “people yet to come” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 108).

In the lexicon of PJ, being more fully human is the product of the social person engaged in a different process of recovery. What is recovered is a latent but powerful (i.e., freeing) humanness. This potency makes its presence felt through incipient manifestations of authentic human relatedness. This is the power to be and to relate another way or ever more humanly (Nietzsche, 1988/1968). What is restored is a resting and yet to be realized quality of freedom that, when channeled, contributes to the emergence of a radicalized form of subjectivity (Cornell, 1998). In the lexicon of PJ, becoming more fully human is the product of the social person engaged in a different method of transformation. What is transformed is a hidden but powerful (i.e., freeing) humanness. This potency makes its presence felt through adaptive manifestations of dynamic human relatedness. This is the power to evolve in being human or to become otherwise than being (Levinas, 2004). What is transformed is an awaiting but non-activated quality of freedom that, when released, contributes to the emergence of a radicalized form of subjectivity (Cornell, 1988). From the perspective of PJ, the interdependent, mutually supporting, and co-productive presence of (a) incipient authentic recovery in human relatedness and (b) adaptive dynamic transformation in human relatedness are two core constituents of a developing normative theory of trans-desistance (Arrigo, 2014).

According to the diagnostics of PJ, the status of subjectivity—of recovering being and of transforming becoming productively—is in crisis, especially given contemporary and dominant manifestations of human relating (e.g., Crewe, 2013). Within the realm of criminal justice practice and mental health treatment, prevailing views on the subject of crime locate harm within the specified risks of the individual that need correcting (e.g., Polaschek, 2012). Indeed, the risk-need-responsivity model identifies “promising targets for change” (Andrews & Bonta, 1994, p. 33) within the criminogenic “drug user,” “offender,” “mental health consumer,” or “desistor.” Alternatively, when constructed definitions of palliative care are proposed, they typically are built on extant categories of “good living” (Ward & Maruna, 2007), “mental illness” (Davidson, 2003), and/or “making good” (Maruna, 2001). These conceptualizations often and unwittingly endorse a process of desistance and offender treatment that only furthers status quo conditions (Farrall & Calverley, 2006). These conditions tend to reify the values of capital logic (i.e., they affirm the normalizing political economics of the “American Dream”), and the veridiction of this logic fetishizes its own material production (Foucault, 1977). This materialism includes the mass production of industry devices, techniques, and instruments; institutional best practices, standards, and procedures; and system treatments, therapies, and curatives that fix or restore the offender (i.e., the patient, convict, or addict). These curatives reduce the status of subjectivity to the crass commerce of human capital’s commodification via social engineering (Marx, 1993), and to the social stigma of a spoiled identity via moral entrepreneurship (Goffman, 1986). As such, they (these correctives and curatives) limit and deny prospects for productive subjectivity (Arrigo & Milovanovic, 2009). Indeed, commenting on the human social fall-out that follows from sustaining the pains of the imprisonment-release-reincarceration machine, Halsey (2007) noted,

Young men in custody generally are not permitted, let alone expected, to show initiative or to take anything approaching a meaningful degree of responsibility for their daily lives. Instead things are done to them and for them and only very rarely with them (and/or with their consent). In this sense, [the kept] are taught to react rather than to act. They are taught to respond rather than to initiate. They are taught what to think rather than how to (un)reason. (p. 1222)

Accordingly, PJ argues that reliance on criminogenic correctives and status quo curatives captures the social person in constructed image (i.e., symbolically), historicized narrative (i.e., linguistically), and embodied truth (i.e., materially) as shadow (Arrigo & Bersot, 2014).² These are the traces of being and/or of becoming; the presence of productive subjectivity as an incomplete aesthetic, a fragmented epistemology, and an intangible ethic (Arrigo, 2013b). Based on the diagnostics of PJ, it is the systemic maintenance of this debilitating condition that is the subject of crime. Harm follows when manifestations of recovering and transforming human relatedness are less than what is or could be imagined (intrapsychically, in consciousness), less than what is or could be spoken (interpersonally, in shared meanings or in systems of thought), less than what is or could be inhabited (institutionally, in lived habits and customs), and less than what is or could be replicated (communally, in the artifacts of a culture built on growing human relatedness). Thus, recognized responses to crime, coherent forms of rehabilitation, and legitimate types of reconciliation are themselves at best glimpses and whispers of desistance; specters of what a more fully human journey of recovery and transformation could be or could become (Arrigo & Milovanovic, 2009; Crewe, 2013).

Still further and mindful of PJ’s clinical diagnostics and cultural criticism, when renditions of the social person as shadow are collectively taken to be healthy, normative, and inevitable human social progress, then a society of captives is made more imminent (Arrigo, 2013a). This is a quality of captivity that renders being more authentic and/or becoming more dynamic as increasingly lacking in consciousness. Thus, the experience of a different healing response-rehabilitation-reconciliation desistance process is symbolized progressively as inconceivable or as unimaginable (i.e., as a non-existent aesthetic). Moreover, this is a quality of captivity that renders being more fully human or becoming otherwise than being as ever more silenced in systems of thought. As such, the narratives of a different desistance journey are gradually encoded more as incomprehensible or as indescribable (i.e., as a distant, deferred, or dismissed epistemology). And finally, this is a quality of captivity that renders subjectivity’s otherwise more fully emancipated recovery and embodied transformation as productivity to normalize and de-pathologize, to discipline and domesticate (Foucault, 1977). Consequently, the project of human social capital as productive difference, and the making of a fuller, more liberating experience of recovery and transformation for all, are made steadily by all to be immaterial or uninhabitable (i.e., an intangible ethic). These circumscribed manifestations of human relating, then, respectively, constitute the art (Brown, 2009), reason (Sloop, 1996), and science (DeLanda, 2006) that sustain a society of captives. The normalized recurrences of these cultural artifacts increasingly limit and destructively deny authentic and dynamic human relatedness. The reductive and repressive co-productions of a society of captives are also the subject of crime. Contributing to or cultivating this criminal behavior’s ubiquity is nothing short of madness (Arrigo et al., 2011; Simon, 2009).

PJ’s diagnosis of human social capital as shadow and as situated within and emerging out of a society of captives can be overcome. This overcoming requires a reengagement with the maddening harm that it (a society of captives) nurtures, the citizenship that it (the shadow) erodes, and the quality of justice that both imprison. To adequately address these matters, it is essential first to specify how the risk of being and becoming more fully human is culturally managed. These observations help inform PJ’s philosophy and its emergent normative critique. As subsequently posited, the grounding of this ethic holds considerable promise for the process of recovering and then transforming subjectivity more productively, and for realizing a more fully human journey of desistance for all.

Responding To Crime: On Normative Philosophy and Trans-Desistance Theory

As suggested at the outset, a trans-desistance theory derived from the philosophy of PJ necessarily would reconfigure the response to crime, would redefine its institutional curatives and correctives, and would reconceive the process of offender treatment. This nascent theory, then, would dramatically recast the subject of crime. As delineated above, the subject of crime consists of (a) the recurring productivity of subjectivity as shadow and (b) the recurring co-productions of a society of captives. According to PJ, the trans-desistance response to crime begins by accounting for the ubiquity of these constitutive conditions in the relations of humanness as found within and operating throughout the process of offender treatment (Arrigo, 2011a).

As demonstrated elsewhere (Arrigo, 2013a), the captivity of authentic and dynamic human relatedness extends to and legislates over multiple “offender” groups. Members in these groups co-produce the subject of crime. These membership groups consist of the kept, those who enforce or police captivity, those who administrate over and/or educate for its maintenance and legitimacy, and those who are enthralled by the assembled replications (DeLanda, 2006) and spectacled reenactments (Brown, 2009) that showcase the shadows of human relatedness. Individuals within each of these membership groups participate—often quite deliberately—in the preservation and normalization of a society of captives.³

Members of the kept include, among others, the criminally incarcerated, persons civilly committed or institutionalized because of mental illness, and substance abusers and misusers placed in various types of custody. These sets of individuals are some of imprisonment’s usual suspects. The art, reason, and science of the kept consist of the categories of human relatedness into which they are inserted and out of which they perceive, choose, and act as productive subjectivity. Recognized examples of these constructed categories include the classification schemas, offender profiles, and diagnostic taxonomies that symbolize, brand, and manufacture the kept as would-be threats or potential hazards to police and inspect, to monitor and observe (i.e., to manage; for example, Simon, 2009). Investments in this management approach are culturalized as normative, given how they (the kept) exhibit or embody risks. These risks affirm their reductive and repressive statuses (i.e., spoiled identities) as diseased (mentally ill), disordered (drug dependent), and/or dangerous (criminally motivated; Goffman, 1986). These identifiers, then, function as the “summary representations” (Henry & Milovanovic, 1996, p. 242) out of which and the choreographed logic through which the kept engage in human relatedness (e.g., undertake rehabilitation, recovery, reentry, desistance). These representations and logics co-constitute the subject of crime.

The keepers of the kept include all those who utilize techniques of compliance (e.g., prescribed drug therapies and other offender treatment regimens) and/or insist on mechanisms of constraint (e.g., solitary confinement, in- or out-patient civil commitment) to discipline and domesticate human social capital. These sets of individuals exercise planned control over the relations of humanness, enforce tested and authorized offender curatives and correctives, and ensure that system-sanctioned norms prevail in the official desistance process. The art, reason, and science for the keepers of the kept find expression in the rules and procedures, policies and practices, standards and protocols that limit and deny their humanity—their possibilities in being and becoming more fully human. Under these debilitating conditions, the keepers of the kept can only superficially relate and passively interact (Farrall & Calverley, 2006), making them into “docile bodies, bodies of abject utility and mere functionaries of the state” (Foucault, 1977, p. 210). The reproduction of these risk management relations of humanness contributes to finalizations in being and becoming (Bakhtin, 1982). These finalizations are manifestations of symbolic, dialogic, and interpersonal harm in offender treatment (Arrigo, 2013b), rendering the possibilities of recovery and transformation to finite declarations and fixed exchanges of productive subjectivity. These finalizations co-constitute the subject of crime.

The regulators of the kept consist of all those who educate for and about captivity’s legitimacy, administrate over captivity’s maintenance, and govern and/or legislate on behalf of captivity’s normalization. These sets of individuals promote status quo dynamics, including captivity’s standardization. This standardization includes self-presentations that habitualize human relating through prescribed role performances and recognized master statuses. These relational tactics avert anticipated harm, manage risk, and affirm a stabilizing type of moral entrepreneurship (Goffman, 1986). The art, reason, and science advanced by the regulators of the kept are personified in the marketplace subculture and the consumer-focused politics that further the prison industrial complex (Brown, 2009). Contemporary examples of this subculture and politics include the rise in actuarial justice and security (Schinkel, 2011), the commerce in surveillance and telemetric policing (O’Malley, 2010), and the proliferation of neuroscience technology and engineering fitted to penal law and institutional policy (Arrigo, 2007). Under these conditions, being and becoming are reduced to and repressed by the “apparatuses” of human relatedness (Agamben, 2009, p. 12). When unreflectively maintained, these apparatuses produce nothing more than “fabricated selves” (Polizzi, Draper, & Andersen, 2014, p. 241) The scope of harm that follows from such risk regulation is expansive. Indeed, within the realm of offender treatment and desistance,

the apparatus of the correctional machine seeks to not only manage and control those held by its disciplinary regime, but also seeks to manifest that control within the thoughts and behaviors of these incarcerated individuals, which in turn attempts to re-fabricate the very identity of the [social] self. (Polizzi, Draper, & Andersen, 2014, p. 241)

These fabrications co-constitute the subject of crime.

The watchers of the kept are composed of all those who complacently observe or slavishly depend on the captivity of human relatedness for identity-claiming or thrill-seeking purposes. Members of this group include the general public. The art, reason, and science to which the watchers of the kept are drawn are located in the reenactments and replications of captivity that populate print and electronic outlets, as well as digital platforms and forums. The information acquisition that follows (often incomplete in its imagery; fragmented in its storylines; and disconnected and dislocated from contexts, settings, and circumstances) manufactures carnival-like viewer consumption. This consumption yields pseudo-thinking and pseudo-self-making (Arrigo, 2013a). This is risk management built on the theater of infotainment. Examples include dramatized reality television programming about crime and punishment, and stylized docudramas about work, life, and death within jails or prisons. Excessive investments in human relatedness derived from derivatives and imitations of simulated social reality are harm-producing, in that these simulations reduce being and repress becoming (DeLanda, 2006) to forms of digital captivity. These reductions and repressions include virtualized caricatures of (Brown, 2009) and manufactured counterfeits for (Sloop, 1996) the kept, their keepers, and their administrators. Although captivating, these composites are nothing more than the cyber-shadows of fabricated being and becoming (Arrigo & Bersot, 2014). These reenactments and replications co-constitute the subject of crime.

PJ seeks to overcome the art (the representations), reason (the logics), and science (the finalizations and fabrications) that currently co-constitute the subject of crime. A developing trans-desistance theory initiates its response to crime by delineating the ubiquity of crime’s structurated madness. As presently configured, the process of recovery and transformation nurtures the glimpses and whispers of productive subjectivity within and throughout the relations of humanness. Moreover, as presently assembled, participant experiences of recovery and transformation support the incapacitating condition termed a society of captives given their group memberships and allegiances. The maintenance of this condition is folly; it troublingly implicates one and all. As a preliminary corrective, PJ relies on the normative (although mostly underdeveloped) foundation of its philosophy to redress the subject of crime. Clearly, this ethic would need to emerge from a philosophy of being and of becoming. When fitted to an emergent trans-desistance theory, this ethic begins to redefine the institutional curatives needed to overcome the constitutive subject of crime.

Philosophies of being and becoming have a rich and evocative lineage in the continental tradition. At their core, these ontologies question the project of citizenship (Aristotle, 1976), the will required to mobilize and unleash citizenship’s dynamic power (Nietzsche, 1966/1886; 1968/1888), the cultivation of a care ethic as a critical dimension of “being” (i.e., of inhabiting dynamic power; Levinas, 2004), and the possibilities of “becoming-other” (i.e., of inhabiting citizenship as ethically revolutionary; Deleuze, 1983). Collectively, these philosophies of human relatedness seek to restore and to transform “citizenship values and desistance” (Farrall & Calverley, 2006, pp. 131-149). This is a journey into the possibilities of being more authentic and of becoming more dynamic, notwithstanding the shadows to which productive subjectivity has been relegated and the captivity to which society’s group members have been consigned.⁴

In the lexicon of PJ, citizenship is co-produced. It is structurated by and through the jurisprudence of the mind, the politics of subjectivity, and the micro-physics of power (Arrigo, 2012). When the art, reason, and science of human relatedness repeatedly manifest themselves as the shadows of being and of becoming, and when the society of captives recursively presents itself through membership group relatedness that finalizes incipient authentic recovery and adaptive dynamic transformation, then human social capital can only produce the captivity of society. Stated differently, given that the subject of crime as diagnosed by PJ is a recurring cultural artifact, then the possibilities for more fully productive relations of humanness are increasingly rendered unimaginable, inexpressible, and unlivable. Indeed, as conceived in consciousness (the jurisprudence of the mind), as historicized in the narratives of human social progress (the politics of subjectivity), and as embodied in the customs, rituals, and practices that inscribe being and becoming (the micro-physics of power), authentic and dynamic citizenship is continuously forestalled and foreclosed for, by, and about one and all! This is how a society of captives devolves into the captivity of society. This is how the subject of crime transmutes into the crime of subjectivity. Recovering and transforming the ethics of citizenship as institutional remedy, then, is at the crux of developing a theory of trans-desistance.

For PJ, the ethics of citizenship—of recovering being and of transforming becoming—begins as an exercise in diagnostics and critique. Thus, PJ questions how and for whom productive subjectivity is extolled within and throughout the desistance journey and its relations of humanness. As heterodox method, PJ reexamines the cultural forces or presences that co-constitute human relatedness for the kept, as well as for their keepers, regulators, and watchers. Their structurations and assembled parts are data to be mined. These data are located in the images of crime and in the symbolizations for justice that populate the consciousnesses of group members within a society of captives. These images and symbols are expressed in the texts of treatment and in the codes of corrections that reflect prevailing institutional thought, and they are reproduced in the practices of recovery and in the habits of transformation that manufacture (finalize and fabricate) the official desistance journey. Presently, the interdependent, mutually supporting, and co-productive co-constitutions that emerge from these cultural forces suggest that citizenship is increasingly and dangerously fixed for, by, and about one and all. Commenting on this deplorable environmental state affairs, Polizzi et al. (2014) noted,

Current attitudes in corrections and offender treatment and the policy initiatives these evoke, reveal an underlying set of negatively defined socially constructed meanings about offenders that effectively contradict and undercut any superficial [let alone detailed] discussion about the benefits of rehabilitation, reentry, or restorative justice practices. It is very difficult to envision what successful work in corrections, offender psychotherapy, or rehabilitation would actually look like in such an environment. Successful work with offender populations will be difficult to achieve without first thoroughly addressing the way in which these socially-generated definitions, concerning who and what the offender is, both restrict and actually prevent the type of success the criminal justice [and mental health] system[s] appear willing to pursue. (p. 4)

This institutionalized state of affairs affirms the shadows of being and becoming, and these ontological harms must be vanquished. The ethics of citizenship as a dimension of a nascent theory of trans-desistance initiates this release.

To reconceive the process of desistance, PJ adopts an Aristotelian-derived approach to restoring and transforming the relations of humanness (Arrigo et al., 2011). This approach to being and becoming more fully human holds that the embodied practice of excellence (or of living virtuously) is dynamic; it evolves. Experiencing human flourishing (i.e., excellence in authentic being and dynamic becoming qua citizenship), then, is about cultivating emergent habits of character for one and all. These evolving habits of character—when imagined (i.e., as a symbolized aesthetic), spoken (i.e., as a constructed epistemology), lived (i.e., as a material ethic), and reproduced (i.e., as a cultural reality)—have the nearest power to harness productive human social capital, to free being and becoming from the forces that bind and check them, and to surmount the madness that reproduces (indeed celebrates) the shadows of the social person. Undertaking this more fully human journey of desistance is a strange and unfamiliar expedition for a people yet to be (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994).

As praxis, PJ affirms the interactive, interdependent, and interrelated link between thinking about (i.e., theorizing) and doing (being for and becoming about) justice. When culturalized, this condition represents the flourishing of human social capital, of productive subjectivity, and of citizenship. Theory and action are inseparable from and interconnected to this change-oriented enterprise. The project in question entails investments in the social person’s incipient authenticity and adaptive dynamism. To harness and then to unleash these untapped possibilities for change, different relations of humanness must be symbolized, spoken, and practiced by a society of captives within and throughout the journey of trans-desistance.

Thus, following PJ’s Aristotelian-sourced ethic, the question is how and for whom do the virtues of citizenship inhabit justice? An assessment of this habitation reveals that the possibilities of being and becoming, of managing risk differently, and of producing more fully human social capital for and about all, are perilously forestalled and foreclosed. Indeed, given the cultural forces that support the subject of crime as discussed throughout this article, the erosion of human flourishing as occupying justice is regrettably self-evident and, with it, the process of trans-desistance is disturbingly done. As Arrigo (2013a) warned when addressing the reach of captivity and its ethic of injustice:

When psychiatrically disordered convicts are placed in long-term disciplinary isolation, how and for whom does this practice exhibit courage, compassion, and generosity? When criminally adjudicated sex offenders are subsequently subjected to protracted civil commitment followed by multiple forms of communal inspection and monitoring, how and for whom is dignity affirmed, stigma averted, and healing advanced? When cognitively impaired juveniles are waived to the adult system, found competent to stand trial, and sentenced and punished accordingly, what version of nobility is celebrated and on whom is this goodness bestowed? (p. 687)

Responding to normatively sourced interrogatories such as these begins to reconceive the ethics of justice in offender treatment. These responses would benefit from additional clarification on the art, reason, and science of this different jurisprudence (of the mind), politics (of subjectivity), and micro-physics (of power). Pursuing these under-examined directions in praxis would advance the development of a theory of trans-desistance, a critical theory for a people yet to be.⁵

Conclusion

Criminal justice practice and mental health treatment are in need of structural, institutional, and interpersonal reform. As proposed throughout this article, reformation (i.e., recovery and transformation) begins with diagnostic inquiry and cultural critique. At issue is the status of subjectivity. As a form of philosophical heterodoxy, PJ indicates how the response-rehabilitation-reconciliation desistance journey presently renders human social capital incomplete in its aesthetic, fragmented in its epistemology, and insubstantial in its ethic. This harm implicates all whom it captivates. The reductive and repressive co-constitutions of subjectivity as assembled within and throughout the process of offender treatment culturally demonstrate this. The recurring shadows of being and becoming and the debilitating presence of a society of captives demonstrate how these structurations are harm-generating. Thus, they (these harms) need to be overcome.

As a preliminary corrective, PJ’s normative grounding is both provocative and suggestive—especially for purposes of cultivating a nascent theory of trans-desistance. As proposed, trans-desistance seeks dramatic change over “atypical human behavior” (Ward, 2013, p. 704), in which “ex-offenders . . . develop a coherent, pro-social identity for themselves” (Maruna, 2001, p. 8). To enable this reform and to redress crime’s co-constitution, the theory reconsiders the ethics of citizenship (as method) and of justice (as praxis). Citizenship radicalizes human social capital; justice re-culturalizes this re-identification experience for one and all. Clearly, the art, reason, and science of trans-desistance theory warrant further critical refinement. This stimulating challenge awaits the thoughtful attention of scholars, practitioners, and policy makers alike.

Footnotes

Notes

Bruce A. Arrigo, PhD, is professor of criminology, law, and society in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, and professor of public policy at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is an elected fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and he is a past recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Crime and Juvenile Delinquency Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

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