John Braithwaite

Who they are

Braithwaite is a Professor in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Publisher and institutional biographies describe him as having been Head of Law there and as having founded and headed the Regulatory Institutions Network, known as RegNet. He began in academia, worked in government and with non-governmental organisations, and returned to academia in 1984, and describes himself as a social scientist throughout.

His public roles included representing community groups on the Economic Planning Advisory Council between 1983 and 1987 and serving as a part-time Commissioner with the Trade Practices Commission from 1985 to 1995. He was named a co-winner of the first Stockholm Prize in Criminology, announced for 2006, with Friedrich Losel. He has spent time on peacebuilding research in Bougainville and the Solomon Islands, which began with a year there as an exchange student in 1969.

His work crosses criminal justice and business regulation. Regulation, Crime and Freedom, a collection of his essays first published in 2000, is organised under four headings: dimensions of inequality, responsive regulation, republican legal institutions and restorative justice.

Key papers

Crime, Shame and Reintegration (1989)

Cambridge University Press. The book argues that the useful question about shaming is how disapproval is delivered. Reintegrative shaming condemns the deed while sustaining a relationship of respect, and it ends with the person being welcomed back. Stigmatising shaming labels the person and does not lift the label. This site did not read the book in full. The definitions here come from Braithwaite's own later account of the theory and from a profile by the International Institute for Restorative Practices.

Restorative Justice and Responsive Regulation (2002)

Described in the same profile as a summary of his theories and a review of related research, linking his work on restorative justice and regulation.

Key ideas

Reintegrative shaming. In his own description, friends and family confront an offender about the harm done and allow remorse, so that the offender can rejoin society. The contrast is with a disrespectful disapproval that labels the person as bad, treats the label as permanent and lets deviance become a master status.

Responsive regulation. Inspectors adapt their approach to the behaviour of the organisation they oversee. According to the profile, cooperative approaches produced higher compliance than punitive ones.

Exit conferences. He pioneered these in nursing-home inspections in the United States and Australia in the 1980s, bringing stakeholders together to solve problems and repair harm.

How the theory has been tested. Kristina Murphy and Nathan Harris described reintegrative shaming theory in 2007 as popular in criminology but rarely tested. Their survey of 652 tax offenders found that offenders who felt reintegrated were less likely to report evading tax two years later. It is an association in self-reported data and not an experiment, which is the pattern for the empirical support this site has reviewed.

Where it meets other work. Anna Lembke's prosocial shame, in chapter 9 of Dopamine Nation, draws a similar fork between shunning and acceptance with amends, without citing Braithwaite. The identification of his theory as the nearest academic analogue is this site's, not hers.

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