Narrative Criminology
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Narrative Criminology

Understanding Stories of Crime

Lois Presser, Sveinung Sandberg

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eBook - ePub

Narrative Criminology

Understanding Stories of Crime

Lois Presser, Sveinung Sandberg

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About This Book

Stories are much more than a means of communication—stories help us shape our identities, make sense of the world, and mobilize others to action. In Narrative Criminology, prominent scholars from across the academy and around the world examine stories that animate offending. From an examination of how criminals understand certain types of crime to be less moral than others, to how violent offenders and drug users each come to understand or resist their identity as ‘criminals’, to how cultural narratives motivate genocidal action, the case studies in this book cover a wide array of crimes and justice systems throughout the world. The contributors uncover the narratives at the center of their essays through qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and written archives, and they scrutinize narrative structure and meaning by analyzing genres, plots, metaphors, and other components of storytelling. In doing so, they reveal the cognitive, ideological, and institutional mechanisms by which narratives promote harmful action. Finally, they consider how offenders’ narratives are linked to and emerge from those of conventional society or specific subcultures. Each chapter reveals important insights and elements for the development of a framework of narrative criminology as an important approach for understanding crime and criminal justice. An unprecedented and landmark collection, Narrative Criminology opens the door for an exciting new field of study on the role of stories in motivating and legitimizing harm.

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Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2015
ISBN
9781479891597

Part I

Stories Construct Proper Selves

1

The Rapist and the Proper Criminal

The Exclusion of Immoral Others as Narrative Work on the Self

Thomas Ugelvik
Understood as a moral space, a prison symbolically positions its prisoners as a group of immoral others. Everyday life behind bars has numerous ways of communicating that most basic of the prison’s messages to its prisoners: you are not to be trusted. All forms of interaction in the institution will be structured by prison officers’ professional focus on the worst case, and their multiple efforts to keep it from becoming reality. The result is that day in and day out prisoners are reminded of the fact that being a prisoner is being a member of a group of immoral people who cannot be trusted. Many prisoners experience this ascribed group affiliation as an attack on their self-image, and thus as one of the pains of imprisonment (Sykes 1958). They are frustrated by and often protest against this institutionalized lack of trust. Brede,1 a prisoner in remand (imprisoned pretrial) in Oslo Prison, put it like this: “Is everything we say just lies, then? Is that it, just ‘cause we’re here in prison, does that mean we only tell lies?”
Reacting to the unwanted change of moral status imprisonment entails, many prisoners claim that the fact that one has broken a rule does not mean that one has no rules. This chapter explores one of the strategies prisoners employ to adapt to and assuage this particular pain of imprisonment. I will analyze how practices of exclusion and hierarchy building may be interpreted as part of the self’s work on itself. More specifically, I will show how narratives about violence against and exclusion of rapists and sex offenders are used by prisoners to counter the ascribed stigma of immorality and symbolically reposition themselves as morally conscious proper criminals. The rapist, a narrative figure common in prison culture, is used to signify true evil in stark contrast to a narrator repositioned as a proper criminal with strong moral fiber. A byproduct is an important distinction between two types of crime: the rational (and defendable) crimes of the proper criminals and the immoral horrors perpetrated by so-called rapist monsters.
Appraising the truthfulness of the narratives is not relevant from this perspective (Sandberg 2010); rather, the focus is on exploring the dynamic of a specific kind of exclusion and its consequences, and on showing how such practices are essential for prisoners when they try to make sense of themselves and their own lives. I will not approach prisoners’ narratives as records of what really happened, but—following Brookman, Copes, and Hochstetler (2011)—as means of identifying with (subcultural) expectations that arise from prison-specific identity threats. Inspired by narrative criminology (Presser 2004, 2009) and a narrative understanding of self-making (inter alia Ricoeur 1992; Bruner 1997; HarrĂ© and Langenhove 1999; Davies and HarrĂ© 2001), narratives and accounts may be understood in their performative capacity (following Butler 1993, 1997, 2006). What you do and what you say you do is clearly not the same, but stories are not just talk. Following a narrative understanding of self-making, narratives are speech acts that performatively reposition the narrator; tales reflect back on the teller.
Thus understood, narratives are central to human existence. By continuously telling and retelling our life stories (in the widest possible understanding of the term), we recreate ourselves as consistent moral actors across settings and over time. An individual constructs continuity and stability through the social construction of culturally acceptable life stories; this process thus connects the individual, the social, and the cultural (Geertz 1973). A chaotic mess of experiences is thus transformed into a (somewhat) coherent and culturally legible narrative.

Context and Research Methodology

Oslo Prison is Norway’s largest penitentiary. With a capacity of 392 prisoners, it houses over one tenth of the total national prison population. The all-male facility originally was built on a hillside outside Oslo. Today, it is located in the eastern part of the city center, skirted by a multiethnic residential area. The facility has two major units. The oldest one, a Philadelphia-style penitentiary that opened in 1851, houses prisoners with sentences of up to two years. The newer buildings, which until 1939 accommodated a brewery, are predominantly for prisoners held on remand (imprisoned pretrial). On Norwegian remand wings, you will mostly find prisoners suspected of violent crimes, drug crimes, and sexual offenses.
As part of a larger ethnographic study on power relations and identity work in prison, I collected observation and interview 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 in this part of Oslo Prisons, between 80 and 90 percent, were on remand. Most of those prisoners, who had received a final verdict, were in the process of being transferred to facilities considered better suited for prisoners with longer sentences. The approximate fifty prisoners (the exact number of occupied cells varied, as a number of cells were undergoing ad hoc renovation) shared a small common area with a large TV set, pool, and Ping-Pong tables as well as a small weight training area. The cells—albeit sparse, gloomy, and somewhat reminiscent of the 1930s rebuilding process—have sanitation facilities and a TV set.
I was given free access to both wings, could come and go as I pleased, and talk to any prisoner I wanted to without going through the officers first. Conversations mainly took place in the small, shared common area or in the privacy of a cell together with one or two prisoners. Like the prisoners, I wore civilian clothes. In addition, I had a visible ID card identifying me as a university employee, a single key on a sturdy chain to unlock the gates between the two wings, and an assault alarm on my belt. Quickly realizing that there are only three reasons for wearing a collared shirt in prison—you are on your way either to court or to a funeral, or you are an officer—I deliberately tried to dress down. As I had no official role in the prison system and no cell keys, I spent most of my time hanging around, drinking coffee, playing pool, and talking with anyone about whatever they wanted to talk about. What Geertz (1998, 69) has called “deep hanging out”—“localized long-term close-in vernacular field research”—worked well as a research strategy in an environment where people have a lot of time on their hands and not a lot to do, although it did provoke a lot of jokes about my seemingly endless break from “real work.”
I never took notes while in the presence of prisoners, believing that it might inhibit my participation in the interaction with them. Prisoners in general are suspicious of strangers. A notepad would potentially add to this sentiment and make initial meetings difficult. Instead, I wrote down my observations on the same or the following day, with an effort to reflect meaning, language, tone, and style, as well as the relevant context of the words spoken.
Most of the prisoners I interacted with over the course of my year in Oslo Prison would self-identify as so-called proper criminals, that is, prisoners who have done the kinds of crimes that are validated in the prison culture. Property crimes are accepted, as long as they are on a certain level—stealing shiny sports cars is OK, stealing bicycles is not. Violent crimes are also acceptable, at least when you refrain from hurting those manifestly weaker than you, and you have a good and believable (and rational) reason. Drug crimes may be acceptable, unless you are known to sell drugs to children or you use a lot of drugs yourself. Mindful of the potential ethical problems associated with prison researchers imposing themselves on incarcerated research objects, I deliberately took a passive role when meeting new arrivals. I let participants make a first move by showing an active interest in participating in the study. Prisoners who were known rapists or sex offenders hardly ever did; they often isolated themselves in their cells and declined to participate in the everyday interaction on the wings. The material analyzed here thus reflects only the self-identifying proper criminals’ talk about the rapists, not the feelings and thoughts of those individuals labeled as rapists.

Prisoner Hierarchies and Moral Superiority

Prison hierarchies have long been the focus of prison research (e.g., Clemmer 1940; Sykes and Messinger 1960; Jewkes 2002; Crewe 2009; Trammell 2012). Seeing hierarchy building as part of the self’s work on itself is not an entirely novel thought: Jewkes (2002, 145), for instance, describes how a “key feature of the prison hierarchy is the need for convicted criminals to feel morally superior to someone.” One could extrapolate that this feeling of moral superiority might influence self-image and perception of self-worth—which is the connection I would like to explore: narratives in support of the prisoner hierarchy may result in feelings of moral superiority, which again means that they may be employed as part of a wider process of collective moral sense making and self-making.
Individual and collective identities are the results of ongoing processes in which relations of difference and similarity are established between the individual and the group and designated others (Böss 2011). A moral subject can only have high morals in contrast to immoral others. A moral community is thus constituted in relation both to a shared moral code and to out-groups of immoral others who must be controlled, excluded, or sanctioned. In this perspective, subjectivity is to a certain extent the result of what the subject is not, that is, its constitutive outside.2 That which is put on the outside acts as a constitutive border post, constituting the inside. Butler (1993, 72) puts it like this: “The subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, ‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation.”
In his later works, Foucault studied the subject’s work on her- or himself with the aim of turning her- or himself into an ethical subject (Foucault 1990a, 1990b; 1992). Becoming an ethical subject is all about different ways of getting to know oneself as an example of an ethical subject in and through practice. According to Foucault, it is 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 2005; cf. Flynn 1985). On this practical level, morality is about the ways individuals adapt to and act out a given moral code, and the techniques they employ to tell and retell the stories about themselves as people with morals, whatever that might mean in a given context (Foucault 1997a, 1997b).
Connecting all the dots between these theoretical positions, I will argue that morality narratives about exclusion of immoral others may be reconceptualized as part of what Foucault called the techniques of the self.3 The specific culturally accepted and validated techniques of the self available may differ extremely between moral systems (Edel and Edel 1959). 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 it is possible to 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 tell a story about how the specific person acting in a certain way fits hand in glove with the moral system articulated. At the same time, the moral acts of moral subjects reconstitute the entire moral system as a social fact. Such an analysis of moral self-making in practice could concentrate on how people narratively create or talk themselves into being ethically conscious, if not ethically superior, people in a given socio-cultural context, and how nonconformist behavior is understood, explained, and possibly sanctioned. According to Foucault, ethical narratives are fundamentally social and relational. They are social because their purpose is to connect a single act to a larger set of conventions, something which must be social in nature, and they are relational because the ethical practices presuppose an other to give the acts the meaning of ethical acts—confession is not worth much as technology of the self unless someone listens and has the power to absolve. Put differently, the government of self by the self is necessarily articulated in the self’s relationship with others (Foucault 1997a).
The gist of this argument, then, is that the stories people tell are tools used in the everyday work on the self they engage in as part of their encounters with other people. I will show how one important narrative figure frequently encountered in a prison context, the rapist, is used as symbolic boundary marker in the ethical self-work of prisoners who thereby can recreate themselves as proper criminals: straight-up, trustworthy professionals, miles away from the honorless evil rapist of prison culture. The narrative articulation of an ethical code thus works as a dividing practice (Foucault 2000a); it is constitutive of the difference between good and bad people. I will now turn to one facet of this process as it is played out in Oslo Prison—the narrative exclusion of rapists and sex offenders.

Narratives about the Rapist and the Proper Criminal

In Oslo Prison, it was hard to find the sort of (more or less) clear-cut prisoner hierarchies described by others (e.g., Clemmer 1940; Sykes 1958). Instead, several competing hierarchies seemed to be operating simultaneously. Drug traffickers argued that they are smart and savvy businessmen far superior to the simple and brutal violent offenders, while the violent offenders claimed that drug traffickers are cynical profiteers lacking a sense of honor. Who occupied the bottom tier of the different hierarchies was indisputable, however. Even below the universally shunned figure of the snitch, one could always find the rapist or sex offender.
In narratives about rapists and sex offenders, the prisoner who is an ethical other marks a fundamental and radical difference from the narrator. Rapists hurt people who are weaker than they are, an act generally frowned upon both behind prison walls as well as in society in general; and to make matters worse, they hurt women. The innocent, defenseless woman is a necessary implicit constitutive figure when the category of the rapist is talked into being in prison. In such narratives, regular or proper prisoners are driven by their search for easy profit; they are professionals wanting money. This goes for both the proper criminal drug traffickers and violent offenders. The rapist, on the other hand, is evil, perverse, sick, and insane—a monster that the prisoner society, like the society outside, needs to identify and exclude. In contrast to this figure, professional/proper criminal prisoners can position themselves not far from regular wageworkers, at least as far as motivational structures and ethics are concerned.
The resulting discursive division between proper criminals and perverts is of central importance in the prisoners’ ethical self-work. The practices of exclusion are many. For example, I’m hanging out in the common area with Tom. A young prisoner on the gallery above us points a finger at a third prisoner, aiming it like he would a pistol. He “shoots” at him with the imaginary weapon, the illusion bolstered by an accompanying loud sound resembling a gunshot. Tom talks me through what we just observed:
Tom: That guy [the one who got “shot”], you know, he’s one of those rapists. Damn, he took a seventeen-year-old girl and raped her for hours. Fuck! But he got what he deserved, too; an Albanian guy in here, he has the body mass of me and you combined, took him out. One blow, that was it. He stayed down. Another guy, he was put in the washing machine. They have these big machines down at the laundry. They just threw him ins...

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