Introduction to the Special Issue

• Author: Bruce A. Arrigo,Tony Ward
• DOI: 10.1177/0093854814550022
• Published date: 01 January 2015
• Date: 01 January 2015

CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND BEHAVIOR, 2015, Vol. 42, No. 1, January 2015, 5 –6.

DOI: 10.1177/0093854814550022

© 2014 International Association for Correctional and Forensic Psychology

5

INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE

BRUCE A. ARRIGO

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

TONY WARD

Victoria University of Wellington

Keywords: introduction; rehabilitation; correctional psychology; values and ethics; desistance

The literature on offender treatment and desistance from crime is in its formative period

of development. To date, theoretical, empirical, clinical, and policy analyses have

raised important questions about risk assessment, good lives programming, and socio-cul-

tural critique. One issue at the center of this literature that has yet to be systematically con-

sidered is the role of values and ethics in the desistance process. This issue acknowledges

that a moral sensibility or code is very much a part of official responses to criminal conduct,

approved modes of rehabilitative intervention, and certified forms of reconciliation. What

is not so clear is whether this “moral entrepreneurship” effectively promotes or impedes the

journey of offender treatment and desistance from crime. This special issue of Criminal

Justice and Behavior aims to examine these dynamics.

In the “Response to Crime” section of this special issue, authors consider where and how

institutional decision making (i.e., the system’s approach to desistance) advances the aims of

social justice, psychological well-being, autonomy, and/or other dignity-enhancing impera-

tives. Bruce Arrigo reviews this concern philosophically by proposing how the normative

and cultural diagnostics of psychological jurisprudence are useful for developing a “trans-

desistance” (i.e., human social capital) theory of offender treatment, recovery, and transfor-

mation. Astrid Birgden addresses this matter conceptually by integrating therapeutic

jurisprudence principles with the doctrine of human rights as fitted to the reparative logic of

desistance. Heather Bersot and Bruce Arrigo investigate this issue jurisprudentially by

explaining how the U.S. Supreme Court case law on sex offenders and sexually violent

predators represents decision making that furthers the (underdeveloped) ethical aims of

legal moralism.

In the “Modes of Rehabilitation” section of this special issue, authors consider where and

how offender treatments and therapeutic correctives manage human risk or grow

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Bruce A. Arrigo,

Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, NC

28223; e-mail: barrigo@uncc.edu.

550022CJBXXX10.1177/0093854814550022Criminal Justice And BehaviorArrigo and Ward

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