Shadd Maruna

Shadd Maruna is an American-born criminologist who has held academic posts at the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester, Queen's University Belfast and Rutgers University-Newark, where he served as dean of the School of Criminal Justice, before returning to Britain as head of the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool. His book Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives introduced the concept of the redemption script, a narrative pattern Maruna found among former offenders who successfully desisted from crime by reinterpreting their past as leading meaningfully toward a reformed identity, and the book was named Outstanding Contribution to Criminology by the American Society of Criminology in 2001. He later received the society's Hans W. Mattick Award for distinguished contributions to criminology and served as its president in 2023.