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The Nashville John School: Affective Governance and the Reintegrative Shaming Approach
Abstract
Contemporary anti-prostitution campaigns focus on curtailing "the demand" by punishing sexual service consumers. One component of this approach is a diversion program, or "john school," offered to those arrested for purchasing prostitution. This ethnography focuses upon the Nashville John School (NJS), which is comprised of informational presentations that educate johns about the risks associated with prostitution. I examine how the NJS utilizes elements of John Braithwaite's (1989) "reintegrative shaming" as a technique of affective governance designed to discipline participants into docile subjects, whose sexual practices comport with an ideal envisioned by the state. Using Nathan Harris' framework of shame management, I discuss participant responses as expressions of shame-guilt, embarrassment-exposure, or unresolved shame. Such categorizations illustrate the extent to which the affective appeals of program presenters are taken up or resisted. At the same time, I consider the type of subject the NJS seeks to produce: an individual whose sexual practices reside within a heteronormative marriage. I conclude that this mode of interpellating subjects into an idealized gender binary must be reconsidered, especially in light of diverse and emergent understandings of gender, sexuality, and family formation.
... In the case of shame, the emotion can be experienced internally by offenders when they consider themselves to have fallen short of a certain social or moral standard. The experience may lead an individual to acknowledge that they have committed a wrongdoing, but if the shame continues after a sentence has been completed, it could cause exoffenders to withdraw themselves socially from the larger group (Valenzuela, 2016). Similarly, when a person is seen in a stigmatized manner, they are perceived in a stereotypical and undesirable way by the larger social group, which then leads the group to socially reject the exoffender (Goffman, 1963). ...
... First, future research could continue investigating the factors that influence third-party support for giving offenders a clean slate. For example, in the literature on restorative shaming, the process has been described as one in which the offender, from the beginning, is never seen as an outgroup member and is never judged as having an unchanging, deviant character (Braithwaite, 1989;Valenzuela, 2016). Future research could investigate when such appraisals occur and how they affect third-party support for giving offenders clean slates following punishment. ...
When crimes occur, there is third-party support for retributive justice, but is there also support for the idea that punishments should give offenders clean slates? In addition, how might support for rehabilitation compare with support for retribution, and with support for giving a clean slate? Two studies tested how crime severity affected support for the 3 sentencing objectives: retribution, rehabilitation, and giving an offender a clean slate. Further, the studies tested whether anger and compassion toward the offender mediated the relationships between crime severity and the sentencing objectives. Results show that as crime severity increased, support for retribution increased, support for rehabilitation was unaffected (in Study 2), and support for giving a clean slate decreased. In addition, the relationship between severity and retribution, and the relationship between severity and clean slate, were both mediated by anger and compassion. For rehabilitation, there was an indirect effect involving compassion but not anger.
Understanding the motives, behaviors, demographic characteristics, and deterrence strategies of those involved in purchasing commercial sex have focused on samples of men. Through an online survey of men (n = 381) and women who purchase sex (n = 143) in the United States, this study provides an exploratory examination on the differences of purchasing by gender. While men reported purchasing sexual services at a higher rate, women who purchased were less likely to be in a relationship. No differences in the deterrence of purchasing were found by gender, yet current deterrence strategies were not found to be effective among the sample.
Affect modulates and directs the governance of street prostitution in encounters between street-involved women and their social services and healthcare providers through three nodes on a circuit of affect. The first is the street, constituting a set of geographic and psycho-social phenomena that exert a formative and often intergenerational impact on street-involved women’s lives. The second, selfhood, connects an understanding of trauma as inhibitory to cognitive development with the governmentality of mental health diagnoses. The third, embodied abjection, links the physical states and practices connected with addiction, homelessness, incarceration, and other forms of social suffering, with street-involved women’s abjection.
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