Exploring the Truths of Moral Reconation Therapy: A Dialogical Narrative Analysis of the Voices of Women on Probation and Facilitators

This study examines Moral Reconation Therapy (MRT) as a mandated narrative intervention focusing on how women on probation and MRT facilitators make sense of its emphasis on responsibility, honesty, and trust. Drawing on interviews with eight women on probation and two MRT facilitators at a Women Reentry Project, we conduct a dialogical narrative analysis. This approach examines how multiple, sometimes competing, voices emerge within the clients’ accounts and those of the facilitators. Women frequently draw on institutional narratives of responsibility to account for compliance and credibility, while disclosures of trauma and addiction tend to surface later or remain only partially articulated. Facilitator narratives complicate dominant critiques of MRT by revealing how responsibility discourse is both enforced through authority and softened through care, community ties, and trauma-informed awareness. Rather than treating narrative contradictions as evidence of dishonesty or resistance, this analysis interprets them as dialogical tensions produced within a correctional storytelling regime. By centering collective storytelling, narrative competence, and power, this study moves beyond recidivism as the sole metric of effectiveness and offers a more nuanced account of MRT’s impacts as multiple, contested, and relationally produced.