Chair: Jennifer Fleetwood

I Will be a King There”: A Psychosocial Case Study Analysis of a Violent Life Course Persister”
Stephanie DiPietro and Heidi Grundetjern

Constructing and maintaining a ‘non-criminal identity’: a narrative inquiry into the lives of people with convictions
Nicola Collett

‘How does the story end?’ Autoethnographic research and positive redemption narratives
Carlotta Allum

Narrative Care
Jennifer Fleetwood

The last decade has seen a considerable increase in criminal record research from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives. However, much of this research has taken a ‘top-down’ approach, exploring how a criminal record may impact any one individual. Whilst this has laid the foundations for so-called ‘collateral consequences’ research, it largely fails to capture the voices of people with criminal records (PWCRs). Moreover, it means the disclosure interaction itself has been overlooked, and we know very little about how people experience the sharing of past ‘criminal’ experiences with others. Drawing on the author’s PhD research, this paper will illustrate how the criminal record constitutes a life-long narrative project, whereby PWCRs are required to engage in identity management as they (re)construct, share and revise their understandings of past events and present-day identity, with others. Drawing on conceptualisation of emotion work and narrative labour, the paper will show how this identity management extends beyond disclosure ‘events’ (e.g. job interviews) and becomes an enduring process of stigma management in everyday life.

This paper examines how Stretch Charity works with personal narrative in their practice of working with people in prison using art and digital storytelling. Taking an auto-ethnographic perspective, it examines how the researcher’s experience and personal narrative (as a person who has experience of prison) is part of Stretch’s workshops and narrative co-production. The presentation will share some examples of digital films produced by Stretch and reflect on how the personal narratives they contain reflect an entrepreneurial style of telling, echoing the research used in setting up Stretch. These entrepreneurial ‘redemption narratives’ pose tricky ethical and personal dilemmas that this paper will explore.

Between 2022 and 2023, the researchers formed a research network with Member Artists from Clean Break Theatre company in London. Clean Break supports women who have experience of being at risk of, or becoming involved with, the criminal legal system. Working alongside a creative associate, we facilitated a series of workshops exploring the problems and possibilities of personal narrative for individual empowerment and social change. This paper describes an emergent concept: ‘narrative care’, or care for stories. The concept responds to member artists’ experiences of a lack of respect or care for their personal narratives in and following involvement in the criminal legal system. Here we will share early findings from our collaboration, and outline what we understand by ‘narrative care’.

Criminologists often emphasize the structural and cultural roots of violence, but less attention has been paid to how sociological processes intersect with psychological processes to shape violent behavior. We present a case study analysis of the life history of Abdullah: a persistent perpetrator of serious violent crime in Sarajevo, Bosnia, who in his childhood suffered abuse and neglect by his parents, and in his youth served as a soldier during the Bosnian War. Drawing from both psychosocial criminology and narrative criminology, our analysis shows that Abdullah’s self-narrative is shaped by unresolved internal conflicts developed as an adaptation to prolonged trauma, as well as readily available constructs of hyper-masculinity exacerbated by the sociopolitical context of war. We highlight the ways in which his self-narrative sustains his chronic engagement in serious violent crime and hinders desistance. We argue that the combined utility of narrative and psychosocial frameworks enables a more comprehensive understanding of the complex connections between social processes and processes of the mind when explaining serious violent behavior, and that this framework particularly helpful for explaining violent offending that persists beyond the age of maturation. Our study also contributes to the body of scholarship on crime persistence and the trajectories of life course violent persisters.