Abstract
Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg’s collection of essays establishes a framework for the emerging field of narrative criminology, offering a contribution to cultural criminological studies. In Narrative Criminology, the editors take a constructionist approach to storytelling that aims to understand and confront the narratives of offenders.
Part I focuses on the methods offenders use to internally conceptualize and justify their behaviors in order to continue viewing themselves positively. Chapter One’s strong start to this collection provides insight and background for the theories and frameworks referenced throughout the other essays. Thomas Ugelvik’s study identifies how prisoners exclude sex offenders through a process of othering, allowing them to reconceptualize their own character as properly and morally criminal. Chapter Two explores the gender-based narratives of women in an Ecuadorian prison who have been sentenced for drug trafficking, highlighting the importance of silence, connectedness, and situational gender identity. Gender themes are again analyzed in Chapter Three, focusing on female methamphetamine users’ perception of self, addiction and recovery, and the construction of the drug as facilitating a successful performance of gender expectations. Chapter Four reintroduces sex offending (this time from the offenders’ perspective) and addresses struggles with post-treatment community integration.
Part II presents stories that are used to minimize harm-doing. Chapter Five departs from the interviews and fieldwork methods of the other chapters in this volume, instead using written archives to consider how policymakers used religious narratives to drive support for the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Chapter Six consists of interviews with cannabis users in order to consider processes of interpretation when telling stories of drug use, bad trips, and addiction. The author of Chapter Seven presents an interdisciplinary approach to the complex narratives of those in total institutions.
The works in Part III highlight the fluidity of narratives involving the shifting in creativity and change in reflexivity. Chapter Eight offers another one of the strongest pieces in this collection, using only three case studies of violent offenders to emphasize the changing nature of storytelling. Chapter Nine is in two parts, with Keith Hayward providing the most theoretically conscious portion of the work in deconstructing the implicit nature of narrative criminology in biography and autoethnography. Kester Aspden then identifies the process of reflecting on his own experiences as a youth offender. Chapter Ten closes this selection with the cultural legitimacy of tax evasion in Italy and the shift from justification to condemnation.
This collection offers a diverse and thoughtful examination of a commonly used but often overlooked area in cultural criminology and provides a useful methodological tool for fieldwork, as well as a theoretical foundation for inquiry.