Making Good to Making Space: Lived Experience and the Convict Criminology Tradition

ABSTRACT

Making
Good’s 25th anniversary offers an opportunity to revisit one of criminology’s most consequential texts through the lens of lived experience scholarship and convict criminology. Few works have done more to transform the epistemic landscape. Maruna’s landmark study repositioned the formerly imprisoned subject as a meaning-making actor, legitimised experiential narrative within mainstream criminology and lent scholarly gravitas to a movement whose claims had long been dismissed or marginalised. This article argues that Making Good prefigured many of the epistemic and political commitments later developed within the lived-experience turn, while its redemptive framework also reflects the limits of its early desistance context. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital, it develops the concept of a legitimacy economy of lived experience to examine how redemptive testimony continues to shape, and sometimes constrain, the terms on which experiential knowledge achieves institutional recognition.