Reproducing Criminal Types: Cognitive Treatment for Violent Offenders in Prison

Abstract

Based upon observation in a cognitive treatment program for incarcerated violent offenders, this article uses a social constructionist approach to examine the program's rhetorical construction of inmates as particular “types” of beings. The program's practices contain ideological representations of criminals that, in turn, sustain and reproduce the program's logic. Specifically, the typification of inmates' “erroneous thoughts” and “anger” is examined as an example of how inmates are “talked into being” criminal types (Heritage 1984, p. 290). Inmates are asked to decontextualize and rearticulate their criminal pasts according to a criminological language of “cognitive distortions” deemed characteristic of criminal “personalities.” In this reductionist process, inmates' “techniques of neutralization” (Sykes and Matza 1957) are stripped away. Facilitators interpret inmates' social and situational counterrhetorics as indications of their criminal minds, thereby sustaining the individualistic typification in criminal classification and correctional philosophy. Thus, the micropolitics of the Cognitive Self-Change program reveals the dynamic, discursive construction of criminal selves according to institutional conditions and demands. In conclusion, it is argued that institutions engaged in managing human conduct require particular constructions of pathological individuals in order to do their work.