Reintegrative Shaming Research Articles

Explaining Alcoholism Treatment Efficacy with the Theory of Reintegrative Shaming

Braithwaite's theory of reintegrative shaming emphasizes the important roles played by satisfaction of intimacy and belonging needs for development of healthy individuals and their social groups. The following article adapts the theory to chemical recovery groups, suggesting that the same needs satisfaction may provide greater success in recovery outcomes.

MEASURING SHAMING IN AN ETHNIC CONTEXT

This study was an attempt to operationalize John Braithwaite's theory of reintegrative shaming, and measure how it is used by parents of different ethnic groups in response to their delinquent children. Based on Braithwaite's emphasis on interdependency, familism, and communitarianism in certain Asian cultures, it was hypothesized that Asian-Americans would be more likely to use shaming as a parenting practice than would African-Americans. The findings showed that the two ethnic groups differ significantly only in verbal shaming; not in non-verbal, physical, or communitarian shaming as measured here. However, when marital status was controlled, ethnicity appeared to have no effect on shaming. Married parents were significantly more inclined to shame their delinquent children than single parents regardless of their ethnicities. New Asian immigrant parents were also more likely to shame than others.

REINTEGRATIVE SHAMING AND COMPLIANCE WITH REGULATORY STANDARDS*

Australian nursing home inspection teams are partitioned into those with an enforcement ideology supportive of reintegrative shaming, those who believe in being tolerant and understanding when confronted with noncompliance with the law, and those with a more stigmatizing ideology toward noncompliers. Nursing homes visited by teams with a reintegrative shaming ideology display significantly improved compliance in the period following the inspection. Nursing homes visited by inspection teams with a more stigmatizing attitude toward noncompliance display an approximately equal drop in compliance. The performance of homes visited by tolerant and understanding inspection teams falls between these two extremes. A more specific test of the theory shows that when interdependency exists between the nursing home and the inspection team, reintegrative shaming has a stronger positive effect on improving compliance. In nursing homes with no link between the home and the inspection team, reintegrative shaming has no effect on compliance levels. These effects demonstrate both the importance and the limitations of reintegrative shaming as a theoretical concept worthy of further empirical investigation.

CONDITIONS OF SUCCESSFUL REINTEGRATION CEREMONIES: Dealing with Juvenile Offenders

Shifting criminal justice practices away from sligmalization and toward rcintegration is no small challenge. The innovation of community conferences in New Zealand and Australia has two structural features that are conducive to reinlegralive shaming: (a) selection of the people who respect and care most about the offender as conference participants (conducing to rcintegration) ; and (b) confrontation with victims (conducing to shaming). Observation of some failures and successes of these conferences in reintegrating both offenders and victims is used to hypothesize 14 conditions of successful reinlegration ceremonies. The spectre of failure haunts modern criminology and penology. Deep down many feel what some say openly—that 'nothing works': that despite decades of study and debate, we are no nearer deterrence than we ever were and/or that more 'humane' forms of treatment are mere masquerades concealing a descent into Kafaesque bureaucracy where offenders suffer a slow and silent suffocation of the soul. Worse still, we fear that even when something does work, it is seen to do so only in the eyes of certain professionals, while 'outside' the system ordinary citizens are left without a role or voice in the criminal justice process. This paper takes a different view. Rejecting the pessimism that pervades discussions about crime and punishment, it offers an optimistic view of at least one area—the punishment of juvenile offenders. It argues that it is possible to develop practices that 'work'—both in the sense of reducing recidivism and reintegrating offenders into a wider web of community ties and support and, at the same time, in giving victims a 'voice' in a fashion that is both satisfying and also socially productive. Further, it links a theory (reintegrative shaming) and a practice (the reintegration ceremony) which explain how to understand and how to implement this success. While there are elements that are quite distinctive about both the theory and practice of reintegrative shaming, there is also a great deal in common with the theory and practice of 'making amends' (Wright 1982); restorative justice (Cragg 1992; Galaway and Hudson 1990; Zehr 1990); reconciliation (Dignan 1992; Marshall 1985; Umbreit 1985); peacemaking (Pepinsky and Quinney 1991); redress (de Haan 1990) and feminist abolitionism (Meima 1990). We differ from abolitionists, however, in believing that it is right to shame certain kinds of conduct as criminal in certain contexts. The rest of the paper has two sections. The second section outlines some fieldwork

SHAME AND MODERNITY

If shaming is crucial to crime control, then is not the task of controlling crime hopeless in modern urbanized societies? It is argued here that any such pessimism must be qualified by a broader understanding of shame in human history. First, the article considers the arguments of Elias that shame became more important in the affect structure of citizens with the demise of feudalism. Elias did not consider the movement away from shame and towards brutal punishment in crime control directed at the lower classes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This period culmintaled in a demonstration of the failure of stigmatization and punitive excess, opening the way for reinlegralive ideals to gather support in the Victorian era and beyond. Finally, drawing on Goffman, it is argued that there are some neglected ways in which shaming can have more power in the city than in the village. Overall, there is no structural inevitability about the impotence of shaming in industrialized societies; there is no inexorable march with modernization towards a society where shaming does not count. My recent book, Crime, Shame and Reinlegration (Braithwaite 1989) advances the theory that nations with low crime rates, and periods of history where crime is more effectively controlled, are those where shaming has the greatest social power. For shaming to attain its maximum effectiveness, it must be of a reintegrative sort, avoiding stigmatization. Stigmatization is shaming which creates outcasts, where 'criminal' becomes a master status trait that drives out all other identities, shaming where bonds of respect with the offender are not sustained. Reintegrative shaming, in contrast, is disapproval dispensed within an ongoing relationship with the offender based on respect, shaming which focuses on the evil of the deed rather than on the offender as an irremediably evil person, where degradation ceremonies are followed by ceremonies to decertify deviance, where forgiveness, apology, and repentance are culturally important. The

Beyond Calvin and Hobbes: Rationality and Exchange in a Theory of Moralizing Shaming: [Rejoinder

In his generous reply to my essay, Professor Braithwaite makes a number of informative extensions and clarifications of his theory of reintegrative shaming. Although this response resolves many of our differences, I would like to briefly revisit the three issues that sparked Braithwaite's strongest reaction: my contentions (1) that use of the theory to guide public policy would sacrifice individual rights; (2) that the theory makes incompatible assurmptions; and (3) that moral values best inhibit crime when reinforced by self-interest. First, after reading his response and his recent book with Philip Pettit, Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice,1 I concede that Braithwaite is loath to sacrifice individual rights for communitarian justice. Although I am equally reluctant to discard adversariness and liberty for Braithwaite and Pettit's dominion, I acknowledge that rights are dearly prized in their republican theory. Readers interested in the likely practical effects of the theory on the quality of justice and the rights of participants should refer to Not Just Deserts and, more generally, the debate on alternative methods of dispute resolution.2

Delinquency in the Land of the Rising Sun: An Analysis of Juvenile Property Crimes in Japan During the Showa Era

This paper assesses Japanese juvenile delinquency from 1936 to 1988. This period encompasses some of the most important events in the history of Japan, including her only military defeat, occupation by a foreign power, and economic ascendance to superpower status. The paper also discusses the impact of modernization and affluence on the Japanese school and family, and attempts to explain selected juvenile property offenses with a theoretical framework of social control, anomie, strain, and reintegrative shaming. The paper concludes that increased individualism, egoism, and materialism in Japanese society may contribute to rising levels of juvenile embezzlement and theft.

REPAIRING THE DAMAGE

that, in practice, where reparation is used in the service of diversion the victim invariably loses out. As a result, after an initial flicker of enthusiasm, official policy makers appear to have rejected the idea in favour of a more traditional approach. In its 1990 White Paper, Crime, Justice and Protecting the Public (Home Office 1990a), for instance, the only forms of reparation to receive an official seal of approval (compensa tion and community service orders: para 4.26) were those administered by the courts, and after an offender has been prosecuted. In this paper I will argue that it would be quite wrong to consign the idea of pre-trial diversion based on reparation to the dustbin of penal reform. First, the findings referred to above do not provide a sound empirical basis on which to conclude that reparation can never be made to work in the service of diversion. Support for this argument is drawn from the findings of a recently concluded study of an adult diversion scheme based in Kettering, Northamptonshire (Dignan 1991). This differs in a number of significant respects from the other schemes that have been reported on so far and, although not faultless, it does appear to offer a more promising model for future development. Second, there are a number of sound policy reasons for persevering with attempts to develop reparation as a means of diverting offenders from court. And finally, the theoretical arguments in support of the practice have been greatly streng thened by Braithwaite's recent work on reintegrative shaming (Braithwaite 1989). However, this would also have important implications for the way the practice is conducted, and some of these are considered in the final section of the paper.

Reexamining Community Corrections Models

Historically, community corrections has been based on models of diversion, advocacy, and reintegration. Increases in crime and more high-risk offenders being sentenced to probation have led to emphases on control and surveillance, and “just deserts,” adversary, and restitution models have replaced the original models. The author argues for strategies of internalization, reintegrative shaming, and victim-offender reconciliation for a comprehensive community corrections model promoting change in the offender, the correctional process, and the community.

Reintegrative Shaming: A New General Theory of Crime?

Reintegrative Shaming: A New General Theory of Crime?

Emotions and adjudication: Status degradation among white-collar criminals

White-collar offenders are widely assumed to be especially sensitive to the embarrassment and shame that accompany public conviction for a crime. The idea of special sensitivity, however, is based largely on speculation and anecdotal data. Through an analysis of interviews with 30 convicted white-collar offenders, this paper shows that adjudication generated anger and rage as well as shame and embarrassment in the offenders. Rage and anger have potentially dysfunctional effects in that they undermine commitment to the legitimacy of the law. Following Braithwaite, I argue that a justice system based on disintegrative rather than reintegrative shaming is counterproductive.