In most common law jurisdictions worldwide, an offender’s remorse is a mitigating factor in sentencing. It matters whether or not a person who has committed a crime is truly sorry for what they have done. And yet how judges evaluate such expressions is unclear. Drawing on 18 interviews with judges in the New South Wales criminal justice system in Australia, this article examines the status of offenders’ live, sworn evidence in the judiciary’s assessment of offenders’ remorse. These interviews with the judiciary reveal that remorse assessment often operates beyond semiotic, representational paradigms (such as ‘demeanour assessment’) and instead works, in experiential terms, as a feeling. When it comes to offenders getting into the witness box and speaking of their remorse, it seems that sometimes something gets felt by judges at the level of embodied affect that then enables them to declare: ‘This person is remorseful.’

This article examines the ways in which offenders 1 are required to provide very particular accounts of themselves and to self-narrate in confined ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in the New South Wales justice system, it explores how the stories that offenders are made to accept and tell about themselves often bear little relationship to their own reflections. It analyses how, despite the expectations of judges and prison authorities, these self-narratives are not products of an offender's soul-searching concerning his 2 past actions and experience; rather they are products of an official legal narrative being imposed on an offender whose capacity to own and enact such a narrative is already seriously compromised. KeywordsPrisons; narratives; ethnography; rehabilitation; parole. Please cite this article as:

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This article tells the story of 'The magistrate and Mr Moore', a true account of an Australian magistrate's experience of sentencing a man for drink driving, and then considers the significance of this story to the fields of socio-legal studies and narrative inquiry. Firstly, it explores how an ethnographic research approach -a sort of immersion journalism -is a productive methodology to access the under-researched area of judges' experiences of sentencing people. Secondly, based on interviews with judges and magistrates in the criminal justice system in New South Wales, as well as, in some cases, observations of their working lives, the article explores the ways in which the judicial act of sentencing in part involves a curious (and vexed) approach to legal narrative.