Prisoners and their victims: Techniques of neutralization,techniques of the self

The stories we are

How can we understand the stories prisoners tell about how they came to be imprisoned? When people in general talk about their current situation and past actions, what are they doing, and what is the status of this talk? One influential way of interpreting prisoner narratives about past crimes is to look for techniques of neutralization. Sykes and Matza (1957) detail five techniques used by offenders to counter and negate the social pressures towards conforming behavior. These are: 1) denial of responsibility (‘it wasn't me’), 2) denial of injury (‘it didn't really hurt anyone’), 3) denial of the victim (‘s/he had it coming’), 4) condemnation of condemners (‘who are you to judge?’) and 5) appeal to higher authorities (‘yes, it's illegal, but God is above the law’). Scott and Lyman (1968) expanded the theory with a division between justification and excuses as two basic forms of neutralization accounts. Justifications are used when individuals admit responsibility for deviant behavior but deny that it was wrong. Excuses, on the other hand, are used when one admits that the behavior was wrong but denies full responsibility for it. When such narratives are prior to the act they are aimed at neutralizing, and they may be viewed as part of the etiology of crime (Ball, 1966; Landsheer et al., 1994; Maruna and Copes, 2005; Presser, 2009; Topalli, 2005). This interpretation would suggest that criminals use techniques of neutralization to resolve their contemplated law-breaking with a desired self-identity, making crime more probable.

An updated, more contemporary version of this argument would be to claim that such criminogenic narratives are results of the narrator’s cognitive distortions and thinking errors. These distortions are viewed as prime targets for correctional interventions as part of the widespread current trend of rehabilitation oriented evidence-based criminal justice. This research tradition would rephrase neutralization accounts in the language of the psychology of criminal conduct (e.g. Andrews and Bonta, 1998), and claim that what is happening is that the clearly culpable is made acceptable through cognitive reconstruction. According to Pratt (2008a, 2008b), one of the exceptional qualities of Scandinavian prisons is the strong standing the ideal of rehabilitation and re-socialization still enjoys in correctional systems viewed as part of relatively well functioning Scandinavian welfare states. No surprise, then, that evidence-based criminal justice has found a fertile ground in this part of the world. In laws, policy texts and regulations, the Norwegian welfare state prison is described as a state-of-the-art technology for the transformation of offenders into includable, law-abiding citizens (Ugelvik, 2011b). Among the different techniques available to the rehabilitation machine, one has had a particularly strong position, in policy texts at least. The so-called cognitive-behavioral program has been viewed as the single most promising instrument for offender rehabilitation. The goal of these programs is to change prisoners’ destructive and anti-social thought patterns into more pro-social alternatives, making crime less probable in the future. Giving up on neutralizations and other thinking errors and admitting guilt is seen as a fundamental part of the process towards rehabilitation. The un-neutralized, undistorted truth is potentially transformative if you can only bring yourself (or be brought) to accept it (Fox, 1999a, 1999b; Waldram, 2007). The original work on techniques of neutralization and the current evidence-based criminal justice trend have in common the view that these narratives ‘precede deviant behavior and make deviant behavior possible’ (Sykes and Matza, 1957: 666).

This element of the theory has, however, been much discussed and criticized. The debate has raged over whether criminals really engage in neutralization before the event or if it is all just ad hoc rationalization or justification after the event. In the following, I agree with Maruna and Copes (2005) that the relationship between neutralization and offending is probably not in any simple sense a causal one. I will argue that an alternative to viewing such narratives as causes of crime is to understand them first and foremost as reflective of a meeting between individuals and a certain socio-cultural context. In such a perspective, people’s accounts of past wrongs may instead speak volumes about the scripts and storylines which may work (both in the sense of communicate and be valued) in a given social environment (Søndergaard, 2002). In the following, prisoners’ stories will not be seen as part of the etiology of crime, be it as an expression of some deviant subculture or other, or on the individual level, as a result of their criminal personalities. Maruna and Copes claim that neutralization accounts, rather than criminogenic narratives to be removed from the cognitive repertoire of offenders, should be seen as examples of human sense-making in general: ‘Neutralization theory should be seen as a theory of narrative sense making and hence part of the process of identity construction’ (2005: 282). This is the path I would like to explore.

Therefore, I will understand the stories we (human beings) tell as performatives (following Butler, 1993, 1997, 2006), and as part of the teller’s work on or care for her- or himself (following Foucault, 1988, 1990, 1992, 1997b), tailored to fit a specific context. The argument is grounded in a narrative understanding of self-making (e.g. Davies and Harré, 2001; Harré and van Langenhove, 1999; Khawaja, 2005). Generally and most of the time, people want a narrative to make sense for listeners or readers, and, preferably, the kind of sense which makes it possible for storytellers to cast themselves as protagonists and heroes in their own tales, as representatives of ‘the good guys’ (Presser, 2009). The objective, then, is not to investigate how people’s accounts of events match what ‘really happened’, nor is it to say anything about the causes of crime. The goal is to highlight the performative positioning work of individuals who reconstitute themselves in the particular social setting that is the prison. Appraising the ‘truthfulness’ of the accounts is not relevant in this perspective; rather, the focus is on understanding the dynamics of a specific kind of narrative and its social consequences, and on asking whether narratives of this kind in fact may be essential for people in general when they make sense of their own lives. Following Foucault’s take on the subject and subject-formation (e.g. 1988, 1997a, 1997b, 2000), one might claim that storytelling is part of a discursive process where people recreate and reposition themselves as particular kinds of subjects – in this specific case, as morally conscious and rational individuals and not simply one of the immoral and untrustworthy prisoners.

Context and research methods

Oslo prison is Norway’s largest. With a capacity of 392 prisoners, it houses over one tenth of the total national prison population. ² The all male facility was originally built on a hillside outside the city. Today, the city of Oslo has expanded to surround its walls, placing it in a multi-ethnic residential area in the eastern part of the city centre. The facility has two major units. The oldest part, a Philadelphia-style penitentiary opened in 1851, houses prisoners with sentences of up to two years. The newest part, an old brewery made part of the prison in 1939, is predominantly for prisoners held on remand (imprisoned pre-trial). On Norwegian remand wings, you will mostly find prisoners suspected of violent crimes, drug crimes and sexual offences.

As part of a larger ethnographic work on power relations and identity work in prison, I collected interview and observation data on two connected wings in the brewery part of the prison over a period of one year (May 2007–May 2008). The majority of the prisoners on these wings were on remand, at any time between 80 and 90 percent. Most of those prisoners who had received a final verdict were in the process of being transferred to other prisons better suited for prisoners with longer sentences. The around 50 prisoners on the two wings combined (the exact number of occupied cells varied, as a number of cells underwent ad-hoc renovation at any time) shared a small common area with a large TV set, pool and ping-pong tables and a small weight training area. The cells are small and gloomy, still reminiscent of the 1930s rebuilding process. They all have had sanitation facilities installed at a later date, however, and a small TV. The cramped conditions are considered acceptable only because the wings are supposed to be temporary stops for prisoners awaiting their sentence. ³

I never took notes in the prison. Observation notes were written on the same or following day, with an effort to reflect meaning, language tone and style, as well as the relevant context. Conversations mainly took place in the small common area shared by the two wings, or in the privacy of a cell together with one or two prisoners. I wore, like the prisoners, civilian clothes, an ID card identifying me as a university employee, a single visible key on a sturdy chain to get me between wings, and an alarm on my belt. Quickly realizing that there are only three reasons for wearing a collared shirt in prison – you are either on your way to court, to a funeral or you are an officer – I deliberately tried to dress down. Having no official role in the prison and no cell keys, I spent most of my time hanging around the wings, drinking coffee, playing pool and talking with anyone interested about whatever they would want to talk about. What Geertz has called deep hanging out – ‘localized long-term close-in vernacular field research’ (1998: 69) – works well as a research strategy in an environment where people have a lot of time on their hands and not a lot to do with it, although it did provoke a lot of jokes about my seemingly endless break from ‘real work’.

The fact that I resemble the prisoner (and officer) average both as gender and age goes (male, early 30s), also played a part in making this a fruitful research strategy (Phillips and Earle, 2010). I was probably included in the informal, everyday conversations on the wings on a more equal footing than what had been the case had I been, let’s say, a middle-aged female professor. The result, over time, was the development of a fairly egalitarian relationship with a group of 30 or so prisoners who, more or less, spent the full fieldwork year on ‘my’ wings. This stable group of key informants also made it possible to get a good rapport with new arrivals quickly.

As a rule, when talking with prisoners, I did not challenge them on their normative stance unless they explicitly asked my personal opinion, which they sometimes did. When they told me about past crimes, I tried to take a non-judgmental position as far as possible, even though this was difficult in some cases. Differently put, our conversations were not based on me expecting prisoners to ‘explain themselves’ or repent. As detailed below, they get quite a lot of that as it is.

I was given free access to the two wings, could come and go as I pleased, and talk to any prisoner I wanted to without going through the officers first. This kind of almost limitless access is hardly the norm in international prison research. Waldram (2009), a prison research veteran with several field work periods under his belt, describes how difficult acquiring even limited access may be. After a lengthy and detailed scrutiny by the police to determine whether he was a security risk, he was granted access by the prison service central headquarters. Having access, however, meant having to wait for an hour or more every day because the paperwork granting him more than a temporary daily access card was ‘still on the warden’s desk’ (2009: 4). Add to this the problem of getting prison ethnography research proposals through ever-vigilant ethics review boards and mechanisms for research funding which hardly favor long-term research without statistically representative findings, and one can understand why Wacquant’s description hits the mark: ‘The ethnography of the prison thus went into eclipse at the very moment when it was most urgently needed on both scientific and political grounds’ (2002: 385). In an era where the use of imprisonment is on the rise – in Norway ⁴ as in most of the rest of the world – what is actually going on behind the concrete walls and barbed wire seems to have been fading from focus. In Bosworth’s words, prison research has become ‘ … cold, calculated, surgical and polished steel. [ … ] These days, most criminologists make precision cuts – no blood – no humanity’ (Bosworth et al., 2005: 259). In recent years, however, we have been experiencing something of a prison ethnographic revival (e.g. Bosworth, 1999; Comfort, 2008; Crewe, 2009; Jewkes, 2002; Johnsen, 2001; Liebling and Price, 2001; Rhodes, 2004). Although prison ethnographies are still uncommon in most countries, these studies are hopefully indicative of a more promising future.

The problematic victim

Being put in prison can be a painful experience in several ways. For many prisoners, the prisoner status itself feels like a moral stigma (Goffman, 1963), a painful label they feel the need to tear off. The ascription of prisoner status brings with it the knowledge that society now sees you as ‘one of them’, a prisoner, a criminal, an immoral other (Becker, 1973). Understood as a moral space, the prison is based on ‘a logic of scission of the social body which performs a radical cleavage between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘evil’’ people’ (Combessie, 2002: 552; see also Mathiesen, 1965: 185–186; Sykes, 1958: 65). Foucault (1995) claimed that convicting people and putting them in prison is part of a wider process of social exclusion and inclusion where prisoners are made to play the role of society’s immoral others. As a prisoner, you are positioned as part of a group used as a contrast agent in the social construction of the normal, decent, regular people outside the prison walls.

Adding to this, the everyday institutional regime of control and administration has numerous ways of communicating that most basic of a prison’s messages to prisoners: you are not to be trusted. Elsewhere, I have argued that prisoners, through being placed in and made the objects of the prison, are made into untrustworthy bodies in four distinct ways (Ugelvik, 2011a). The institution’s optic of control and administration focuses its gaze on 1) violent bodies (all prisoners must be treated as if they may lunge out at any time), 2) contagious bodies (all prisoners must be treated as hepatitis or HIV positive), 3) bodies out of place (all prisoners must continuously be counted and accounted for, prisoner bodies must be distributed in time and space according to specific rules) and 4) secretive bodies (any prisoner may at any time carry secrets, like weapons, mobile phones and drugs, on or in his body). All in all, the normal, everyday life in the institution is structured in numerous ways by the prison officers’ professional focus on the worst case, and their multiple efforts to keep the worst case from becoming reality. A result is that prisoners day in and day out are reminded of the fact that being a prisoner is being a member of a group of people who cannot be trusted. Many prisoners are frustrated by and resist this institutionalized lack of trust. Brede’s comment is illustrative: ‘Is everything we say just lies, then? Is that it, just ‘cause we're here in prison, does that mean we only tell lies?’

I follow Christie’s (1997) observation that ‘monsters do not exist’, meaning that I have not run into prisoners who talk about their criminal activities as something they did because they wanted to be or do evil. For ethically conscious prisoners who want to distance themselves from the monster category, the victims of their crimes may be problematic. Many prisoners, from those who steal from large corporations to those who bring large quantities of drugs into the country, claim that their crimes are of the victimless kind. Other prisoners, however, are imprisoned for crimes that make such claims difficult, even impossible. Prisoners whose actions have transformed specific, identifiable people into victims, people they may know well and to whom they may even be related (or in the words of Landsheer et al., 1994, prisoners whose crimes have ‘low ignorability’), have to somehow live with their victims as painful reminders of the fact that they have hurt another. ‘Having’ a victim (the implied ownership is in itself interesting) is having hurt someone, physically or financially. It is to be in a sort of dyadic relationship, which in turn positions prisoners in the unwanted position of ‘criminal’, ‘predator’ or ‘aggressor’, a morally difficult position to be in. Hurting people who do not deserve it is definitely not something ethically conscious people do. The problematic victim may also act as a reminder of how prisoners are seen by general society on the other side of the walls.

Many prisoners struggle with a guilty conscience. Henning may serve an example. At the time of the quote below, he had come to the prison just a few days before. He was put on remand for the violent assault of his girlfriend, and was still visibly shaken by the experience. In relating what had happened, he broke several of the unwritten codes of the prison:

Now that I’m sober, I’m the most relaxed bloke in the world, my friends would confirm it, but when I'm high on amphetamines, I have poor impulse control, yeah? We, me and my lady, we were high, hadn’t slept for four days. I went to the bathroom, she came in after me and started nagging, you know, and I just couldn’t take it, not just then, I grabbed her arm, hard like, which scared her, I guess, and she hit me. I just lost it then, we had been doing some redecorating, and had one of those rubber hammers laying around, and I grabbed it and started hitting her. Fuck! [Buries his face in his hands for a moment]. But she will forgive me, she will. She said so. Our friends will understand, they’ll understand me, they know that I’m not really like that, I’m really a nice guy. I was totally shocked when I saw what I had done to her.

[ … ]

She saw how sorry I was, I tried not to cry, I didn't want to, she was the one who was hurt after all.

Our conversation takes place in the wing’s common area. Henning and I sit across from one another. Next to Henning in the sofa, another prisoner is reading the paper. As Henning’s story unfolds, he stays quiet, but his body language cannot help but show that he does not approve. He moves his body in a way as to make him almost turn his back towards Henning entirely, even though they’re seated in the same sofa. He sighs loudly and looks demonstratively away. This kind of apologetic account is neither common nor comme il faut among prisoners.

Even though this kind of public display of regret is not common in my data, it is probably not uncommon for prisoners to have feelings of remorse connected to victims. Daniel, for instance, did not regret anything in public. In the privacy of his own cell, however, he shared the following reflections with me:

Daniel: I think about all the people I have done this kind of thing to [credit card scams] through the years. The prison is really way too good for me. I deserve much worse.

TU: So you do think about these things?

Daniel: Sure, of course I do. Think about all the families affected. OK, so it’s only money, they’ll get it back from their insurance. But that takes time, and in the meantime, they’re poor. Think about the holiday they had to cancel. The whole family was looking forward to it, and suddenly the money’s gone. That kind of thing is on my mind. All the plans I have ruined. I deserve much worse.

An ethnography of ethics

In the tradition after Durkheim (e.g. Janowitz, 1991), shared moral sentiments may be seen as a fundamental part of what binds a society together. May and Abraham Edel made this the starting point for their Anthropology and Ethics (1959): every member of every society (or indeed every social group on any level) is expected to accept a certain common bottom line of shared goals and values, if they want to remain members. The concept of ethics is here understood in the widest and most practical sense, as shared social systems of meaning about what one can or cannot do. This is the foundation for the Edels’ attempt to introduce a program for a systematic and comparative anthropology of ethics.

Where there are norms, there is at least to some degree an expectation that people should comply with the norms, there are different ways to comply in practice, and there are practices of non-compliance. Non-compliance is often, but not always, connected to a form of (formal and/or informal) sanction, which can be anything from a raised eyebrow to capital punishment. It is made clear by the Edels’ work that human cultures have developed a myriad of very different and sometimes totally incompatible ethical systems with very different ways of seeing very different practices as good or evil, right or wrong, honorable or dishonorable. The difference is not simply one of variations between specific rules; ethical systems also differ when it comes to the choice of sanctions, the preferred form of control, the degree of force associated with various norms, etc. – just to mention a few of the analytical dimensions suggested by the Edels.

I would argue that such a project lends itself to analysis of the Foucauldian flavor, especially following those of his later works which were sometimes called ‘ethical’, meaning that they are works centered around the subject’s work on her or himself with the aim of becoming an ethical subject, whatever this might mean in a given context (e.g. Foucault, 1990, 1992). Ethical self-work is a practical matter; being an ethical subject is all about doing ethical deeds, performatively recreating the truth about oneself as an ethical subject. Foucault would agree with the Edels that the techniques available might be extremely different between moral systems. Confession, self-flagellation and religious fasting are all examples analyzed by Foucault, but it is quite possible that any kind of act may work, as long as one can infuse it with moral significance and relate it to a specific moral code. The important thing is that every moral action, qua moral action, will always cite or reiterate a specific moral system (or ‘the prescriptive ensemble’, Foucault, 1992), which is the foundation of the moral subject. At the same time, the moral acts of moral subjects reconstitute the total moral system as a social fact.

An analysis of moral self-making as part of everyday practice could concentrate on how people narratively make or talk themselves into being as ethically conscious or even ethically superior people in a given socio-cultural context, and on how non-compliance is understood, explained and possibly sanctioned. On this practical and performative level, morality is about the ways individuals adapt to and act out a given moral code in situations where people interact, how they tell and retell the truth about themselves as people with high morals. It is, writes Foucault, a case of moving the well-known Delphic imperative (know thyself) back into its original context of a much broader set of practices of forming and reforming good relations with yourself (Foucault, 1997a: 88; see also Flynn, 1985). And it is about the techniques and vocabularies available for individuals in their ethical work on themselves, a sort of labor where the individual must ‘act upon himself, [ … ] monitor, test, improve, and transform himself' (1992: 28). It is to one such technique, as prisoners in Oslo prison employ it, I now turn.

Reconstructing the victim as equal

Both Henning and Daniel above had thoughts about and talked about their victims, albeit in different situations and in different ways. They both had to face the problem of the victim when they told the stories about what had brought them to the prison. ‘Having’ a victim is a challenge which has to be met somehow. One possible solution is a form of narrative transformation where the stories of past wrongs are told in a way as to make victims not real victims after all. Transforming your victim into something less victim-like will simultaneously position the narrator as more rational and ethically conscious. This does not mean, of course, that prisoners who tell such transformative tales do not have feelings of remorse, only that they employ a particular form of technique of the self when they meet the victim as identity challenge in the specific context of the public life of a prison wing.

In my material, this kind of narrative denial of, or repositioning of, one’s victims is not uncommon when prisoners relate the stories about how they wound up in prison. Take Trond’s story:

People are so fucking naïve. You just have to call them up and be polite, and they will give you everything. I could call and pretend to do surveys for MMI [marked survey company], and I’d get to know anything. Anything! National ID number, bank, income, and presto, the account’s empty. It’s fucking amazing how stupid people are. I have several times taken cars out for a test drive at the dealer’s with a phony driver’s license. Once, I borrowed a brand new Alfa Romeo without showing any kind of ID at all. They just gave me the keys, like. I guess it freaked him out him a little when the car didn’t return, heh, heh. A test drive without ID, that guy was just a complete jerk. That car is in Morocco now, heh, heh, heh. But I’ve quit conning ordinary citizens now. Even if they are insured, it can be a fucking hassle to have to wait for six months before they get their money back. I only con the large corporations now, and I don’t have many scruples, no I don’t. Røkke [famous Norwegian wealthy industrialist convicted of corruption] being an idol in Norway is a fucking joke. Conning that conman, I don’t have many qualms, to put it like that. I have always voted way left of centre, I have never liked unfairness.

The difference between deserving and innocent victims can also be found in Tom’s narrative about a hit gone wrong:

Everything went wrong that time. They had the wrong address, and just broke through the front door and started destroying the apartment, smashed everything. When they found out they had the wrong guy, he had nothing to do with anything, then it’s like, they don’t do it half way, they ordered the best door they could find that same day and sent the entire family on holiday. The lot. That’s how it is, they couldn’t live with having fucked with innocent people. They just had to pay up. It’s about honor, you know, in gangs like that [biker gangs] honor controls everything. You have to follow the rules.

Tom was on remand, suspected of murder. One day, I sat with him in his cell and talked about the upcoming court case. The date was approaching and Tom was nervous about his courtroom performance. He talked about the incident in question, and how he wanted to frame it in court. After a while, the victim became a sort of empty space our conversation revolved around but did not explicitly touch on. A bit uncomfortably, I tried to direct the conversation in the direction of the subject of the victim:

TU: The guy … this happened with … had he …

Tom: He … well, ok, it’s a woman. That’s why I say ‘the person’. But this is a person who has done time for murder herself, who has drilled people in the joints with a hammer drill to destroy them. You have no idea how many female debt collectors who work in Oslo today. There’s no difference any more, between men and women.

TU: So it’s like total gender equality?

Tom: It is. There are more men, but those women, they’re just sick. [ … ] She also broke people’s knee caps, with those emergency hammers, like they have on busses. She hid the hammer up her sleeve, and just walked over to you and … [shows with finger against my knee].

TU: The red pointy ones?

Tom: That’s the kind. When that hits your kneecap, it shatters in a thousand small pieces. Then, you know, that’s it for you.

TU: Fuck … [shaking my head].

At the time, we had discussed his upcoming court appearance several times. This was the first time Tom admitted that the person he had killed in a fight was a woman, and to make things even worse, his ex-girlfriend. The gender of his victim was not common knowledge in the prisoner community. A murderer of innocent women is positioned both in prisoner culture and beyond the walls as dangerous, evil, sick, uncontrollable, someone responsible for the worst kind of act imaginable. Tom clearly did not want to end up in such an uncomfortable position. He did not want the details to get out, he did not want people to talk, and therefore he always referred to the dead woman as ‘the person’. At the same time, he did not want to lie. In prisoner culture, one has to take responsibility for what one has done. As in the examples above, Tom had to do something to counter the imbalance or, following Sykes and Matza (1957), the cognitive dissonance, resulting from the difference between the way he was (potentially) understood by his peers, and the way he saw himself. Hurting those weaker than you is wrong. Tom did not disagree. His solution to the problem was to tell the tale in a way that narratively positioned his problematic victim as something else than an ordinary, innocent woman. When he later referred to her as a 50-kilo pit bull (quoted at the beginning of the article), the transformation was complete. His ex-girlfriend was no longer a defenseless female victim. She had changed into a raging fighting dog, making Tom’s action nothing less than an ethically legitimate and understandable form of self-defense.

Furthermore, in the above narrative, Tom’s ex-girlfriend was cast not only as dangerous, but also as morally inferior. She herself had served a murder sentence; they were, again, equals. But she hurt people for a living. Tom would not do something like that. So for him, there are murder cases and there are murder cases. His dangerous and immoral victim was not a real woman; in his narrative, she in fact lacked most of those qualities associated with humanity. He used the defeminization and dehumanization of his ex-girlfriend as a positioning tool to make his own acts understandable and ethically acceptable.

Similar tactics were also in play when Tarik related Youssuf’s case to me:

Tarik: Take Youssuf. He has been in Norway for years, soon 30 years in Norway. You could knock on the door of any Moroccan living in Oslo, and he would tell you that Youssuf is a good guy, never any problems with him. There’s nothing to say, no one will have anything on him. But what happened was that his wife, she went behind his back, she cheated on him, and started stealing. Ok, that’s fine, no drama, they got separated. But then she started bringing his kids when she was stealing. So he went to her and asked her if she would please stop doing that, bringing the children. She got mad and went after him with … what’s the name … I have to draw it [draws monkey wrench on a piece of paper].

TU: A monkey wrench?

Tarik: Yeah, a monkey wrench, she was going to hit him. He was coming home from his workout, he had with him a small knife, one he uses for cutting up fruit and such after working out, it was like this [shows three to four cm with his fingers]. Then he lost it, he was pushed too far, he cut her face. It had gone too far. He couldn’t help himself. This gets him a sentence of six years. Six years!

Reconstructing the ethical subject

When Tom narratively transformed his ex-girlfriend into a 50-kilo pit bull terrier, it may look like a classic case of the technique of neutralization called ‘denial of the victim’. Without denying that such techniques may have a part to play in the etiology of crime, I argue here that they might at least also be seen in another perspective, as an expression of prisoners’ need to respond to the moral pressure they are under qua prisoners and reconstruct themselves as moral subjects in the context of the prison. To be a prisoner is to be placed in a morally inferior position. As detailed above, this ascription of immorality has many different aspects and happens on different levels. One example can be found in the cognitive-behavioral programs, currently the shiniest tool in the rehabilitation toolbox. A technique used in many of these programs is a kind of ethical ‘game’ where prisoners through role playing, in a controlled and safe environment of a small group led by a trained prison officer acting the part of instructor or trainer, may explore alternative ways of behaving in situations where different actions will give very different outcomes. Instructors often introduce victims into these role-playing sessions. The imaginary victims are supposed to remind offenders that actions have consequences for other human beings. Another important program element is a modern version of the ancient technique of confession. Program participants have to admit what they have done, that it was wrong, that it had consequences, and assert that they hope to be able to act differently in the future. The programs thus connect the productive and reconstructive force of confession with the group dynamic of role playing and games. It is a form of indirect collaborative control where the offender, through being made the object of a certain technique, is supposed to own up to his flaws and then transform himself into a normal, self-disciplining citizen who acknowledges his responsibilities vis-a-vis society and his fellow man.

It is vital for the process that prisoners are willing to participate and talk about past wrongs and their consequences. Prisoners are expected to confess, repent and see the error of their ways. The goal is that they break with old values and identities and accept the prison’s definition of the situation. Not surprisingly perhaps, this expectation is something prisoners often feel the need to resist. However, openly resisting the program might not be a good idea. As many prisoners will tell you, showing believable signs of change is vital if you want to secure a spot in a comfortable prison in the future. Going through the motions of a cognitive-behavioural program is one of the best-known ways to demonstrate the willingness to change that the institution is looking for.

This is part of the context in which the renegotiation-narratives described above play themselves out. Prisoners tell the story of their victims in a way as to make them less victim-like or less of an ‘ideal victim’ (Christie, 1986). When prisoners renegotiate the victim status of their victims in their stories, they performatively transform from morally questionable and dangerous predators (the kind who need to change and repent), to being understandable and normal men who would only hurt those who deserve it and who are more than capable of defending themselves. In the process, they resist the subject position the prison expects them to take on – the repenting confessor who sees the error of his ways and wants to change. Criminogenic or not, these victim reconstruction narratives thus have effects on the level of the imprisoned subject’s continuous work on her- or himself. The telling of such stories makes it possible for the narrator to position himself as an ethically conscious subject, thus assuaging the pain associated with the moral stigma of being seen as an immoral criminal and prisoner (see Cavanagh et al., 2001; Presser, 2004; Toch, 1993).

Presser (2004) has described how violent offenders reconstitute themselves as morally conscious individuals. Along the lines of Sykes and Matzas’s (1957) classic argument, she finds no denial of a general social moral code. All the men she interviewed agreed that morally inferior people exist. An ethical self-work technique described by Presser is how her interviewees position themselves as examples of something other than these. They talked alternative ethical categories into being in the conversations with her, and they positioned themselves close to the positive categories and marked explicit distance from the negative ones. Simply by narrating, by taking on the role of the narrator of one’s own story, the moral deviant separates himself from past wrongdoing, according to Presser (2009: 180).

Are such narrative repositioning efforts necessarily unique to the prison? Sykes and Matzas’s original theory was explicitly an attack on Cohen’s (1955) criminal subculture theory, their point being that delinquents, rather than being part of a separate subculture, are basically part of the moral community of society in general, accepting the central norms of that community, but that they employ specific techniques to be able to neutralize their deviance in specific situations. My experiences in Oslo prison mirror this: prisoners are not part of a subculture with vastly different or even opposite moral views.

One might say that the techniques of neutralization are part of what one could call (for the lack of a better word) a culture, which needs not be invented anew every time someone wants to make their acts understandable for others. There exists a set of available discourses, the public property of members of that culture, which people in particular situations might employ to make themselves understandable to self and others. At the same time, a more prison-specific inmate code exists, but it is not written in stone, nor on paper, for that matter; it must be continuously reproduced and negotiated through everyday interaction in the specific context of the prison. Put differently, morality is a question of context on different levels. The self-work described in this article is analytically seen as created in and intimately tied to a particular context, namely that of a contemporary Norwegian prison. Being prison-made, they are narratives that work in a prison. They can therefore be used to say something about that context and the pressures and expectations it puts on individuals. The narratives are not prison specific, however, in the sense of being totally unique to the prison. The kind of stories described above can also be found outside the prison walls. But they are shaped by being told in a prison, again understood as a kind of moral space which tags inhabitants as unethical and immoral people.

Following Maruna and Copes (2005), neutralization narratives like those described above are normal, not pathological. Positioning theory tells us that we are all telling such tales all the time – stories designed (in a more or less conscious way) to garner approval and/or minimize disapproval (e.g. Davies and Harré, 2001; Harré and Langenhove, 1999). At least in the vast majority of cases, we want to portray or position or stage or reconstruct what we do in a way that is flattering for us and for who and what we think that we are in the particular situation. Such stories are not ‘thinking errors’ specific to a particular criminal personality, they are ‘as common as breathing’ (Maruna and Copes, 2005: 285). Some narratives and positions work in some situations, others in other situations. Knowing which form of neutralization might fit what situation is part of what it means to be at home in a situation.

In their care of the self, individuals employ technologies of the self which are culturally available and validated forms of practices, and as such potentially useful by individuals in their performative positioning work vis-a-vis a system of norms (e.g. Foucault, 1990, 1990b, 2005a). This perspective on morality as narrative practice can help to highlight the fact that morality may be understood as a mode of subjection. The prison positions prisoners as unethical others in need of change. Many prisoners take this challenge, however, and retell the stories about themselves as people with high moral standards. When individuals establish a relation between the relevant code and their own actions, they constitute themselves as a subject with morals. Technologies of the self ‘permit individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (Foucault, 1997b: 225). One of the techniques prisoners employ to this end is to retell the story of their route into the prison as one without real victims. They thus make themselves into something other than immoral criminals in the process.