Fergus McNeill

Beth Weaver

Mary Corcoran

This edited collection explores the concept of Generative Justice and how it might help us reimagine conventional responses to crime and state punishment. With case studies from the Global North and South, it offers insights into how, within different cultural contexts, justice-involved people find solidarity, belonging and purpose. The book showcases exciting and innovative projects and communities in which unlikely solidarities have been forged among diverse people, through creative practices, education, food, horticulture, and through shared experiences of reentry, recovery and desistance. By exploring the common features and qualities of these generative places, the book sets out an agenda for future research and activism.

Beyond Crime and Punishment

Generative Justice

In Offending and Desistance, Beth Weaver examines the role of a co-offending peer group in shaping and influencing offending and desistance, focusing on three phases of their criminal careers: onset, persistence and desistance. While there is consensus across the body of desistance research that social relations have a role to play in variously constraining, enabling and sustaining desistance, no desistance studies have adequately analysed the dynamics or properties of social relations, or their relationship to individuals and social structures. This book aims to reset this balance. By examining the social relations and life stories of six Scottish men (in their forties), Weaver reveals the central role of friendship groups, intimate relationships and families of formation, employment and religious communities. She shows how, for different individuals, these relations triggered reflexive evaluation of their priorities, behaviours and lifestyles, but with differing results. Weaver’s re-examination of the relationships between structure, agency, identity and reflexivity in the desistance process ultimately illuminates new directions for research, policy and practice. This book is essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of criminology and criminal justice, delinquency, probation and criminal law.

Beth Weaver

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