Lois Presser

I'll Come Back and Stalk You

Lois Presser — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:09:52 PDT

In this article, I analyze conflicts between advocacy and research on offenders and specifically male offenders. The analysis is based on the contradictory investments I had as a female researcher and an advocate during Kevin's final months on death row until his execution. My activism on Kevin's behalf facilitated research access. The interviews provided Kevin with a rare forum for enacting a powerful masculine self, a demonstration that eventually positioned me as his victim. The assuredness of Kevin's execution allowed me to ignore his harassment and to continue data collection. As criminologists, we are likely to be consumers of state control. Criminologists, and specifically women, may also be objects of informants' control. Presented in their structural context, research interactions can illuminate both the far reach of state power and the gendered nature of criminology.

Remorse and Neutralization among Violent Male Offenders

Lois Presser — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:01:13 PDT

Expression of remorse by an offender to his or her victim represents healing in the aftermath of a crime. Thus, it is important to consider what may influence or impede remorse. This article analyzes interviews with 27 men who committed serious violent crimes to examine their talk about victims, responsibility, and remorse. Most of the men excused or justified their crimes using cultural discourses about violence and blameworthy victims. They spoke of feeling sorry for themselves, not for their victims. Men who expressed remorse perceived their victims as morally blameless. They humanized their victims, and their victims humanized them.

Violent Offenders, Moral Selves: Constructing Identities and Accounts in the Research Interview

Lois Presser — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:53:05 PDT

This article considers the research interview as a site for the construction of identities. In recent decades, identity has been conceptualized as something forged through the telling of life stories. To the extent that storytelling is a situated process, self-identification is as well. Using data from qualitative interviews with men who perpetrated violent crimes, I describe the narrated identities of these men, and clarify ways in which the men assimilated the research interview into their narrated identities. First, the fact and the nature of the interview were used to signify something about the moral self. Second, many of the research participants solicited and/or inferred my evaluation of them. The evaluation provided an outside opinion that was invoked or rejected to make self-claims. Third, the moral self and struggle were enacted during the interview. The men used the interview to exclude themselves from a problematic social group, “violent offenders.” The research encounter was a venue for doing social problems work and social problems resistance.

Negotiating Power and Narrative in Research: Implications for Feminist Methodology

Lois Presser — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:41:51 PDT

Values and Evaluation: Assessing Processes and Outcomes of Restorative Justice Programs

Lois Presser et al. — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:36:22 PDT

Increased interest in the restorative justice programs is accompanied by concern for whether they work andthrough what basic processes. Yet the task of evaluating restorative justice programs is a daunting one because they are so diverse, pursuing unique andmultiple objectives. Restorative justice is guidedby values that emphasize healing andsocial well-being of those affectedby crime. These values must guide program evaluation. The authors explore ways to conceptualize andmeasure program inputs and outputs for the purpose of assessing both processes and outcomes of restorative justice programs.

Division of Eco-friendly Household Labor and the Marital Relationship

Lois Presser et al. — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:30:13 PDT

Qualitative interviews were conducted with both members of 12 married couples who had made a commitment to environmentalism in their everyday lives. Women in the sample generally performed more eco-friendly domestic labor than did their husbands. The article focuses on husbands' and wives' accounts for the unintended gender injustice that came with efforts at environmental justice. These accounts stressed that men intended to do their share of the labor, though they did not, while women did more of the labor because they were better at or more interested in it. Men and women offered similar accounts for the asymmetrical division of labor. The logic of the accounts can be used as part of new discourses that promote gender equity while doing environmental justice.

The Narratives of Offenders

Lois Presser — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 08:21:11 PDT

Although criminologists have long used the offender's own story to shed light on crime and its possible causes, they have not plumbed its potential as an explanatory variable. This article considers the way narrative has been conceptualized in criminology and the way that it might be re-conceptualized, following scholarship in other social sciences and in humanities, as a key instigator of action. The concept of narrative is useful for the projects of contemporary criminology because it: (1) applies to both individuals and aggregates; (2) applies to both direct perpetrators and bystanders; (3) anchors the notion of (sub)culture; (4) circumvents the realism to which other theories of criminal behavior are bound; and (5) can be readily collected by researchers, though not without confronting the problematic that is the socially situated production of discourse.