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How parole boards judge remorse: Relational legal consciousness and the reproduction of carceral logic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Kathryne M. Young  and
Hannah Chimowitz
Kathryne M. Young*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA American Bar Foundation, Chicago, Illinois, USA
Hannah Chimowitz
Affiliation:
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
*
Kathryne M. Young, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA., Email: kathrynemyoung@gmail.com
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Abstract

One in seven people in prison in the US is serving a life sentence, and most of these “lifers” will someday be eligible for discretionary parole. But little is known about a key aspect of parole decision-making: remorse assessments. Because remorse is a complex emotion that arises from past wrongdoing and unfolds over time, assessing the sincerity of another person's remorse is neither a simple task of lie detection, nor of determining emotional authenticity. Instead, remorse involves numerous elements, including the relationship between a person's past and present motivations, beliefs, and affective states. To understand how parole board members make sense of remorse, we draw on in-depth interviews with parole commissioners in California, the state with the largest proportion of parole-eligible lifers. We find that commissioners' remorse assessments hinge on their perceptions of lifers' relationships to law and carceral logic. In this way, relational legal consciousness—specifically, second-order legal consciousness—functions as a stand-in for the impossible task of knowing another person's heart or mind. We distinguish relational from second-order legal consciousness and argue that understanding how they operate at parole hearings reveals the larger import of relational legal consciousness as a mechanism via which existing power relations are produced and reproduced, bridging the legal consciousness and law and emotion literatures.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 56 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 237 - 260
Copyright
© 2022 Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

How to cite this article: Young, Kathryne M., and Hannah Chimowitz. 2022. “How Parole Boards Judge Remorse: Relational Legal Consciousness and the Reproduction of Carceral Logic.” Law & Society Review 56(2): 237-260. https://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12601

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