Criminology and the narrative turn

Introduction

I want to address two critical questions: what is new and important about narrative criminology, and why has criminology only recently taken the ‘narrative turn’ that other academic disciplines took decades ago? Doing so permits an update and prognosis of this emerging field, and offers a perch from which to reflect on the whole discipline of criminology within the academy, a way to think about how we fit in.

The paper proceeds in four stages. First, I set out what narrative criminology is and review research framed in its terms as well as research that inspired it. Second, I describe the narrative turn in academia. Third, I consider how criminologists have treated (a) stories, (b) culture, and (c) the self. Fourth, I reason that criminologists have tended to marginalize narrative because they have marginalized culture, ignored the acculturated self, withheld authority from offenders, and neglected mass violence and other collective action as dependent variables and therefore as inspiration for theory.

What narrative criminology is and does

Myth is a foremost preoccupation of criminologists. Most often we engage with myths as parcels of inaccurate public opinion in need of our brand of correction, the dissemination of research-derived evidence. Some of us thematize myths, demonstrating that they animate politically charged campaigns in the name of justice – for example, against drug users and minority youth and for militarized school security. On this view, myths are erroneous ideas to which other people subscribe. Narrative criminology shares common ground with this second conception of myths as animating forces. It is likewise concerned with the role played by cultural constructions in the doing of harm. But narrative criminologists understand such constructions as having a more far-reaching role in our lives than simply as the foundation for repressive or overreaching public policy. Each one of us is guided by myths. We experience the world and all that populates it as representations, never bare of interpretation.

Most readers will understand that claim to be a variation on symbolic interactionism and social constructionism, paradigms that at least nominally ground much criminological thought. Some will accept the point that narratives have a far-reaching role in our lives as a fine idea and yet background it to the many other ‘things’ that are supposedly more salient or more immediate in their impact, things like social inequality or antisocial peers. What is new about narrative criminology? For the field of criminology what is new is focused attention on narratives among discursive forms as causal factors in crime and other harm and for that matter all other action.

First, narrative criminology centers on the narrative form and especially narratives about individual and/or collective selves. Narrative is not just anything that people say. It is not synonymous with discourse; it is a particular type of discourse. Nor will it do for systematic inquiry to call some revealed cultural or subcultural logic or mood a narrative. For most scholars, a narrative is a temporally ordered, morally suggestive statement about events and/or actions in the life of one or more protagonists. Both temporality and moral meaning are essential:

narratives allocate causal responsibility for action, define actors and give them motivation, indicate the trajectory of past episodes and predict consequences of future choices, suggest courses of action, confer and withdraw legitimacy, and provide social approval by aligning events with normative cultural codes. (Smith, 2005: 18)

Narrative displays the goals and intentions of human actors; it makes individuals, cultures, societies, and historical epochs comprehensible as wholes; it humanizes time; and it allows us to contemplate the effects of our actions, and to alter the directions of our lives. (Richardson, 1990: 117)

Narratives suggest the dynamism of experience in a way that other discursive forms do not: “we seem to have no other way of describing ‘lived time’ save in the form of a narrative” (Bruner, 1987: 12). Narratives are vital for signifying moral matters in particular (White, 1987). They explain what we did and therefore what kind of being we are. Through narrative we identify ourselves. The identity work that narratives do ranges in explicitness. In the following excerpt the ISIS organization makes an overt claim about who the group is, a claim that is delivered via a story:

To those of you who ask, who are you? The answer: We are the soldiers of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria … who took it upon ourselves to bring back the glory of the Islamic Caliphate and turn back injustice and indignity. (ISIS City Charter for Mosul, June 2014)

In contrast, a story told by a perpetrator of the 1994 Rwandan genocide is less explicit in setting out who the protagonist is and yet even a superficial discourse assessment makes clear that he is a patient and a follower: “It became a madness that went on all by itself. You raced ahead or you got out of the way to escape being run over, but you followed the crowd” (in Joseph-Désiré Hatzfeld, 2003: 50). Whereas narratives are distinctive strategies for characterizing the world and agents in it, narrative criminologists are largely uninterested in what the world and agents in it are really like. ¹ Recall the policy-promoting myths referred to earlier. The narrative criminology scholar has an interest in them whatever their presumed accuracy or inaccuracy. We wonder about the impacts of stories; it matters little whether they are “true” or “false.”

Hence the second and principal difference between narrative criminology and other views on narrative within criminology: narrative criminology takes a constitutive view of stories, against the prevailing representational view (Presser, 2009; Sandberg, 2010). Narrative criminologists are interested in what stories do – specifically, how they affect crime and other harm – and not principally in what they reveal. For narrative criminologists, subjectivity, which is always forged discursively, is the analytic focal point.

Presser and Sandberg’s (2015) edited volume Narrative Criminology includes several studies of narratives making criminologically relevant things happen. All of these use narrative criminology as a theoretical frame for exploring stories’ impacts on harmful and/or illegal action or avoidance of such action. Narrative criminology can also entail avoidance of such action. For example, Paul Joosse, Sandra Bucerius, and Sara Thompson (2015) examine the narratives with which young Somali-Canadians rebuff terrorist recruitment appeals, conjuring among other things the figure of the al-Shabaab terrorist organization as ‘bogeyman’ and the bogeyman’s victims as “weak, childlike, vulnerable and helpless” (p. 825). Likewise concerned with not doing crime, Sarah Colvin (2015) considers the morally complex literary fiction a Berlin prison theatre company scripted for the stage, exposure to which might facilitate lasting desistance in the face of life’s challenges. Narrative criminology is also a method, directing researchers to scrutinize how stories are composed, what characters are assigned, and what plotlines are developed. Most studies within narrative criminology studies grapple with particular cases, but Presser (2013) set aside distinctions between harm phenomena to formulate a general narrative theory. We are guided to do harm by stories in which (1) harm targets are reduced (e.g. to public enemies, to meat) and (2) the agent is both licensed to harm but also somewhat powerless in the event.

Prior to the formal exposition of narrative criminology, Shadd Maruna (2001) paved its way with his careful study of the influence of narratives on repeat crime. Redemption scripts, “connecting negative past experiences to the present in such a way that the present good seems an almost inevitable outcome” (p. 87) were associated with desistance. Maruna (2001) determined: “The construction or reconstruction of one’s life story into a moral tale might therefore, itself, be an important element of sustaining significant behavioral reform” (p. 105). Whereas ideas about crime as storied pre-date Maruna’s research they were never so assiduously explored nor had they engaged narrative theory. Hans Toch (1993) had identified the ‘war stories’ that violent offenders tell. Jack Katz (1988) stated that a sensational murder could offer up “narrative possibilities” to the offender (p. 302). Curtis Jackson-Jacobs (2004) explored the idea of narrative enactment in an ethnography of young American men instigating weekend brawls for the pleasure of subsequently telling “good stories” about themselves (p. 232).

In addition to these studies in criminology, narrative criminology is heir to a body of work on narrative and violence on a mass scale. This research can be seen as proto-narrative criminology. Their authors, who are not self-titled criminologists, are concerned with specific, albeit large categories of collection action. Yet, their basic insight is narrative criminology’s as well: narratives shape the morally significant things that we do.

For example, case studies of war, genocide, terrorism, and other mass harm bear out the essential role of mythologized ideology. Philip Smith (2005) identifies the apocalyptic story genre that has inspired nations to go to war; other genres, such as tragedies, have not. Allen Feldman (1991) describes the narrative grounds of political terrorism in Northern Ireland, recounting for example a historical and ethical distinction drawn between different kinds of violent characters (p. 46). Christopher Taylor (2009) makes the case that Rwanda’s 1994 genocide by the Hutu majority was founded on stories of their oppression at the hands of the Tutsis. Carol Mason (2002) has unpacked the narrative of abortion as apocalypse which incites groups to anti-abortion violence. On a broader scale, Judith Kay (2005) describes the cultural story behind the death penalty in the United States. Most of these studies concern legal harm, so their influence has led narrative criminology in a more critical direction than other theories of crime tend to go. Once the narrative foundations of social action are recognized, it makes no sense to narrow the frame to illegal action. Indeed, the law and lawfulness are themselves seen as tropes – devices for structuring stories and laying claim to certain selves.

Narrative criminology, being criminology, is relevant to helping as well as harming, and thus also falls in line with research on discursive representations that mobilize participation in social movements, such as frames, ideologies, and stories. Robert Benford and David Snow (2000) and William Gamson (1992) are known for developing Goffman’s (1974) concept of the frame in regard to collective action. New work in the sociology of social movements has embraced narrative (Jacobs, 2002; Mayer, 2014) as the form that collective action frames take. Ronald Jacobs (2002) observes that “the narrative creation of group identity is one of the most important resources for social movement leaders, and must be considered alongside the more conventionally situated resources such as financial and social capital” (p. 210). Francesca Polletta (2006) asks why and under what conditions stories told among activists and politicians arouse emotions like outrage or empathy and compel support. Through analysis of cases including online dialogue concerning a memorial for the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, and African-American legislators invoking Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in their political appeals, Polletta clarifies the strategic uses as well as the pitfalls of stories’ ambiguity and seeming originality or, conversely, their canonicity. She offers insights on when stories persuade and which tellers do well by telling stories.

This body of research is dedicated to collective political action, whereas narrative criminology opens the inquiry to what individuals do, motivated by politics or anything else. Stories inspire their audiences whether those audiences consist of one person, groups of the like-minded, or whole nations.

The narrative turn

To this point I have considered what narrative criminology is and how it was formed. That its inspirations were interdisciplinary is no surprise: criminology in general is interdisciplinary. And yet, criminology has until recently been somewhat unresponsive to certain developments in social theory outside its borders. Contemporary scholars beyond those in literary fields are studying the ways in which narratives profoundly shape all that we sense and know. Whereas “narratives in one form or another have been important sources of research material since the inception of the social sciences” (Holstein and Gubrium, 2012: 3), today’s social scientists analyze narratives themselves. To use the language of positivism, they posit narratives as independent variables. Interest in narratives and narration exploded across academic fields beginning in the 1970s, and gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s (Czarniawska, 2004).

More than 40 years ago historian Hayden White published Metahistory, in which he argued that narrative meaning is a basic feature of what gets called a historical event (White, 1973). A symposium held at the University of Chicago in 1979, which led to a special issue of Critical Inquiry and a landmark collection titled On Narrative, set out “the most fundamental debates about the value and nature of narrative as a means by which human beings represent and structure the world” (Mitchell, 1981: viii). Philosopher Paul Ricoeur theorized the relationships between narrative, consciousness, and action in the three-volume Time and Narrative beginning in 1983. Psychologist Jerome Bruner wrote about the mind’s essential “narrative mode” in 1986, the same year that Theodore Sarbin published the edited book Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct. In 1990 Richardson suggested that narrative should be the proper subject matter of sociology as well as its main methodology, and began to clarify narrative sociology, an area to which criminologist Richard Quinney has contributed (Berger and Quinney, 2005). A narrative focus can be seen within such different disciplines as education, medicine, legal studies, and political science.

All that time, from the 1970s onward, that intellectuals from different backgrounds and with different research agendas were taking the narrative turn, various schools of thought within criminology flourished – the labeling perspective and critical criminology, feminist criminology, life course criminology, biosocial criminology, the routine activity/environmental approach, social learning theory, general strain theory, and more – but no narrative specialty. Indeed, one thriving direction had, in that period, been toward an emphasis on purportedly static, non-subjective states of individual being as crime causes, far from other scholars’ attention to the flux and intersubjectivity of storied existence.

Traditional stories of crime: Representation and resistance

If criminologists value stories at all it is for their capacity to tell us about something else. Reflecting on the use of delinquents’ life stories, especially by the Chicago School sociologists, Bennett (1981) professes: “The aim of the delinquent’s oral history is to move readers toward a sociological, environmental, or community-based perception of the causes of delinquency” (p. 8). That the causes of delinquency are packaged in stories is inconsequential.

The representational view of narrative takes two forms (Presser, 2009). The first posits narrative as a record of what occurred – a relatively straightforward record once the analyst has processed the narrative, perhaps verifying the ‘facts’ it contains against other sources. The second kind of representational view values the interpretation conveyed by the narrative.

Articulating the first view, Sampson and Laub (1992) observe: “Qualitative data derived from systematic open-ended questions or narrative life histories can help uncover underlying social processes of stability and change. They can also help to confirm the results derived from quantitative analyses” (p. 80). In a more focused but comparable treatment of offenders’ narratives as records of theoretically important facts, Agnew (2006) describes what he calls storylines as “key events and conditions leading up to a crime or series of related crimes” (p. 120). He offers as an example: “X loses much money while gambling; X then develops a desperate need for money, because rent and other bills are due; other individuals refuse to lend X money; and X later robs someone” (Agnew, 2006: 120). This discourse is closer to being a chronicle – a minimally evaluated list of events (White, 1980) – than a story. These scholars’ primary interest is in the events and conditions that cause crime: they would have little to do, theoretically and therefore methodologically, with how the offender constructs herself and her life. They want to know the circumstances leading up to crime from the offender’s perspective, not the offender’s articulation of these.

Other criminologists are interested in people’s subjective take on the world and collect stories for their representation of such. In The Jack-Roller Shaw recommended collecting the personal stories of delinquents for the useful information they could provide on youths’ “point of view” as well as social situations and experiences, past and present. He explained:

The boy’s ‘own story’ is of primary importance as a device for ascertaining the personal attitudes, feelings, and interests of the child; in other words, it shows how he conceives his role in relation to other persons and the interpretations which he makes of the situations in which he lives. It is in the personal document that the child reveals his feelings of inferiority and superiority, his fears and worries, his ideals and philosophy of life, his antagonisms and mental conflicts, his prejudices and rationalizations. (Shaw, 1930: 3–4)

Shaw’s use of the words ‘device’ and ‘reveals’ constructs a straightforwardly representational view of narrative. Indeed, Shaw bemoans the subjectivity of the story as “a limitation” (Shaw, 1930: 21). Contemporary ethnographers adopt a similar view in presenting criminally involved informants’ stories of the forces that shape choices to violate the law and/or other people. From these stories we know things about street codes, drug trafficking, gang violence, and state violence, as well as the lived experience of victimization and oppression. Ethnographers including Elijah Anderson (1999), Phillipe Bourgois (2003), and Mitchell Duneier (1999) have used stories to describe criminogenic environments, but the stories themselves do not shape the phenomena of interest. The ethnographic outlook holds meaning and experience to be two distinct phenomena or at least knowable as such. Thus, even for those who study crime and criminalization qualitatively, narrative is a delivery system for other data.

Notably, users of narrative as interpretive statement often laud the emancipatory potential of storytelling for marginalized tellers. Through storytelling, lives can be given new meaning and the defeated may gain some measure of moral and political triumph. Those who have been oppressed or violated make a bid for change by telling their “own stories.” Atkinson (1997) describes the gesture as one of assigning a “recuperative role” for narrative inquiry. Narrative is a vehicle for resistance; it has performative significance, as it does for narrative criminology.

To the extent that narrative criminologists are attuned to the literature on the social structuration of narrative, enthusiasm for narrative-as-resistance is somewhat dampened. Certainly the perspective throws into doubt the notion that the latter are privileged truths about people’s lives. For, while taking note of how narratives shape the world, we must also, as a matter of course, recognize that the world shapes narratives – that the influence is reciprocal. The setting for storytelling is one obvious influence on the stories that get told. Narratives are tailored to particular interlocutors/audiences and forums/outlets (Gubrium and Holstein, 1997; Presser, 2008). They are always “part of a social transaction” (Smith, 1981: 183). Narratives are also patterned after cultural genres – models of how lives can plausibly be constructed (Frank, 2010; Gergen, 1992). The idea here, basic to literary scholarship, is that “dramatic and narrative forms are limited in number and constructed from a pool of familiar and finite elements” (Smith, 2005: 19). Narrative criminologists are not so sanguine, then, that people can ever tell ‘their own’ story. With effort, however, speakers can become aware of and resist, even transform, the various narrative conventions that bind them (see e.g. Ewick and Silbey, 1995). And so, although arguably less nuanced than narrative criminology is in regard to narrative acculturation, students of stories as tools for social change bring us close to the constitutive view that is central to narrative criminology, in which stories “inform human life” (Frank, 2010: 2). A narrative criminology can assist in the project of social change by clarifying how the official truths that keep people in line get constructed and reconstructed (Scott, 1991).

Cultural theories in criminology

As a cultural approach, narrative criminology joins a myriad of other criminological theories. Some criminological theories are formally called cultural or subcultural, but I have a larger set of theories in mind, for a range of perspectives provide space for the idea that people assign collectively derived meanings to things in the world and those meanings somehow and to some extent influence offending behavior. The ‘things’ that are seen to be acculturated in most of these cultural theories are legitimate and illegitimate conduct. The cultural meanings of everything else are largely irrelevant and unproblematic, not essential to the theory.

The acculturated self

Clearly the offender is someone for whom offending has particular meaning. Just as important, though, is the meaning the actor assigns to herself. “People collectively identify themselves and others, and they conduct their everyday lives in terms of those identities” (Jenkins, 2004: 9). Action is wedded to identity. This is true in the sense that we seek to corroborate our identity – I act in accordance with who I think I am – and in the sense that we aspire to certain identities – I act to realize a certain desired self.

Looking for ‘the self’ in the discipline we come up nearly empty-handed. Life course criminologists have brought the individual back to criminology, furthermore emphasizing the individual’s dynamic existence. Of course, though, the self and the individual are two different things. The self is the individual’s imaginary, though imagined in connection with a cultural supply of possible selves. Some life course criminologists have acknowledged the importance of subjectivity to the vagaries of developments in offending over time. Ulmer and Spencer (1999) point out that life course theorists generally assume that actors interpret their life experiences in consequential ways, even if they do not investigate those interpretations.

Lonnie Athens (1997) is exceptional among criminologists for assigning a central place to ideas about the self in the etiology of offending. In Athens’ theory, interpretations of the situation in which one chooses to perpetrate violence follow from a particular self-image: “people with violent and incipiently violent self-images interpret a wider range of situations as calling for violence on their part than do those with nonviolent ones” (p. 68). Athens designed his study to assess self-image as concerns violence only.

A relatively more holistic criminology of identity comes from James Messerschmidt. More than anyone, Messerschmidt has brought criminologists around to the idea that through our criminal and noncriminal actions, we aim to achieve a certain self, following cultural prescriptions and depending on concrete resources. In effect, identity motivates offending. Whereas gender identity is Messerschmidt’s main concern, he recognizes that “accountability to gender is not always, in every social situation, critical to the social construction of crime” (Messerschmidt, 2004: 41). Nonetheless, Messerschmidt’s structured action theory depends on the concept of accountability to something: we hold an expectation that the ways in which we conduct ourselves are subject to social evaluation. Whereas the concept of accountability focuses attention on social settings (see West and Zimmerman, 1987), our acting accountably must also consist in internalized conversations (Mead, 1934) through which we work out and apply our version of social demands.

The labeling perspective is centrally concerned with identification, not identities. Elites identify (the conduct of) some groups and individuals as deviant. Criminalization is likely to follow, and perhaps criminality as well. The labeling perspective attends to identity insofar as a person might believe or internalize the label imposed upon her. But that psychological mechanism is only one of several. Sociologists are more inclined to emphasize concrete challenges posed by stigma – the fact that “labeling places the actor in circumstances which make it harder for him to continue the normal routines of everyday life” (Becker, 1963: 179). Powerful interests determine who gets labeled and real hardships ensue; self-identification is a side concern.

Labeling theorists may dwell little on the subjective self, but they do recognize a key truth about that self, which is that it is socially constrained. We do not choose just any identities we wish; we are in no position to make ourselves up from scratch.

Criminological exceptionalism?

If we forge selves through our narratives, then the just-witnessed fact of criminology’s indifference to the self can explain criminology’s indifference toward narratives. And yet, those who have engaged with identity have treated stories as data sources and not as identity producers. They too marginalize narrative: it is a means to information – methodological tool, not theoretical concept. Why else, then, might criminology have come so late to the narrative turn?

One answer would relate criminology to the social sciences generally, which sought professional credibility in statistics rather than stories. Ewick and Silbey (1995: 197–198) contend:

the virtual absence of the narrative form within social science and legal scholarship has been a self-conscious achievement. Scorned by scholars aspiring to scientific authority, narrative analysis was largely abandoned by social scientists in the 1930s and 1940s. Narratives were thought to be an ambiguous, particularistic, idiosyncratic, and imprecise way of representing the world.

Avery Gordon (1997) similarly observes: “To the extent that sociology is wedded to facticity as its special truth, it must continually police and expel its margin – the margin of error – which is the fictive” (p. 26). Narrative suggests fiction as opposed to hard facts. For disciplines striving to be taken as sources of solid evidence, the choice is clear.

Criminology came to narrative years later than sociology did, so to criminology our inquiry must return. I venture that criminology is especially “wedded to facticity” given that our ultimate referent is the wily offender. In the criminal justice system offenders face demonstrable institutional incentives for portraying themselves in particular, not-necessarily-true ways. Offenders’ stories are taken as devices meant for manipulation. A perspective tied too closely to their stories would likely seem suspect.

That criminology has been so deeply influenced by the criminal justice system does not explain why critical criminology, always dubious of system designations, has neglected the constitutive nature of narrative. Perhaps in their zeal to counter the reactionary tendencies of mainstream criminology, critical criminologists have been exclusively concerned to expose ‘real’ structures that promote harm. They emphasize the broad social structures that bring about conventional crime because these have historically been ignored by mainstream criminologists – think poverty, racist policies, and gender oppression. They are also inclined to highlight the social structures that engender white-collar and state crime, like government-corporate collusion leading to inadequate regulation. My proposal that critical criminologists have avoided the ‘immateriality’ of cultural inquiry is echoed by Ferrell (2007), who found it necessary to show that “contemporary capitalism is a system of domination whose economic and political viability, and its crimes and transgressions, rest precisely on its cultural accomplishments” (pp. 92–93). Both oppression and resistance, in the prevailing critical view, may have a discursive aspect but power relations and the harms they create take material form first and foremost.

Criminologists would probably have encountered narrative theory via the recent literature on collective action. But too few are reading it, I suspect because we have not been inclined to view the often legal actions of large numbers of people as within our topical jurisdiction (Day and Vandiver, 2000; Hagan and Rymond-Richmond, 2009; Yacoubian, 2000). We have told ourselves a story of ourselves as detectors of truths about a transgressing few, promoting the good of a conforming majority and coming to the aid of an ethical state.

Concluding remarks

Criminology gave minimal theoretical attention to narrative until quite recently. In this regard it has lagged behind the other social sciences. I have argued that this lag follows from our general neglect of related concepts, especially the acculturated self, and the sorts of collective action, including but not limited to criminal actions, that are clarified through storied ideologies and frames. I believe that narrative criminology nudges the discipline toward greater theoretical inventiveness and empirical reach. The narrative turn prods us to view crime as an aspect and a product of human actors’ ongoing project of meaning-making.

So much for what narrative brings to criminology. Does criminology bring anything to narrative studies and if so, what? Keen (2003) writes that “the scrutiny of narrative from so many different angles promises new understandings and new questions” (p. 5). Narrative criminology raises unique disciplinary questions like: What features of stories construct violence as good or make preventable suffering out to be inevitable? What stories and story elements can dissuade or offset harm? Second, because criminology is inherently interdisciplinary, our narrative turn will showcase methodological fusions – for example, both quantifying narrative elements (Youngs and Canter, 2012) and teasing out textual features via linguistic analysis (O’Connor, 2015). We will study grammar, genre and characterization, discursive exchange, and the sociopolitical context of narration. Finally and I think most importantly, criminology highlights the life-or-death importance of narrative. Our engagement raises the stakes of narrative research.

Given the high stakes of the analysis, we would do well in future to undertake critical evaluations of narrative and explorations into how it operates, following our colleagues in the humanities. Are both episodic and life stories equally salient to offending? What about stories excites and energizes? More fundamentally: What is a story and what is the story? The former question remains a matter of some debate; the latter is a major methodological challenge for the field of narrative criminology. For how can we ‘catch’ the criminogenic story when the analyst is always shaping the story that she takes as data, however minimal her interview prompts and however faithfully she records the story (Presser, 2004, 2008)? Researchers, like social actors, are in pursuit of coherence in their various reports. Perhaps like artists we should get more comfortable with incoherence, which also conveys meaning and can be strategically deployed by actors (Polletta, 2006; Sandberg, 2013).

I sometimes wonder if criminologists have not neglected self-narrative because of its association with imminent endings – that is, their own mortality, as opposed to a more emotionally safe preoccupation with the mortality of those (e.g. murder victims) they research. Narratives are ways of marking the time of living beings; a story of oneself after one’s being has ended – here or in an afterlife – is unthinkable. Ironically, however, as meditations on action, stories structurally beat back nothingness and passivity. What is more, like all art, stories pursue an existence for eternity. I prove that I am alive and I establish my immortality as a character in my story. At last, then, I want to make a case for narrative inquiry as a means of connecting criminology with the artful and spiritual dimensions of the lives of those we study. We should engage full-on with death (see Van Marle and Maruna, 2010) as a theme or character, perhaps always merely implied, in stories that promote harm or healing.