The rise of courtroom media has provided the public with hundreds of glimpses into that supremely tragic moment when a felon, sometimes just a teenager, learns he is sentenced to life imprisonment. Then, despite their efforts at bravado, there is no hiding the shock and disbelief. His life is over. The possibility that he blotted from his consciousness has actually become unbearably real.
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What happens next, when the convict is borne away to his cell to ponder what Anglo-Irish writer Edward Plunkett called the thoughts of the newly dead? Thanks to criminology, we know that many replay in their minds the moment of their downfall, often obsessively, especially in the aftermath of their arrest. This phenomenon is rooted in human psychology, where
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