The Problem of Story: Criminal Evidence, Affect, and Sense-making

Dilemas: Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social, 2021

em 'Vocês com as suas leis e nós com as nossas': Histórias de um assassino que atravessam domínios normativos conflitantes examinamos uma entrevista com um assassino na Venezuela e comparamos duas histórias ali narradas: uma sobre o assassinato e outra sobre a sua vida familiar. Embora a maior parte da primeira dissesse respeito ao homicídio, invocando valores e normas ligadas à subcultura criminosa, nela também se avaliou o crime a partir da perspectiva de um enquadramento convencional que reconhecia a importância da família. A segunda história, ambientada nesse mesmo quadro familiar, revela um conflito entre diferentes exigências normativas postas ao assassino. Ele resolveu-o dando finalmente primazia a seus valores e identidade subculturais. Employing Labov's structural model of stories and Schönbach's typology of accounts, we examine an interview with a murderer in Venezuela and compare two stories that were narrated within it: one about the murder and one about his family life. While most of the first story accounted for the murder by calling on values and norms that attach to the criminal subculture, it also evaluated the crime from the perspective of a conventional framework that recognized the importance of family. The second story was set within that same family framework, revealing a conflict between different normative demands made on the murderer. He resolved it by finally giving primacy to his subcultural values and identity.

This article tells the story of ‘The magistrate and Mr Moore’, a true account of an Australian magistrate’s experience of sentencing a man for drink driving, and then considers the significance of this story to the fields of socio-legal studies and narrative inquiry. Firstly, it explores how an ethnographic research approach – a sort of immersion journalism – is a productive methodology to access the under-researched area of judges’ experiences of sentencing people. Secondly, based on interviews with judges and magistrates in the criminal justice system in New South Wales, as well as, in some cases, observations of their working lives, the article explores the ways in which the judicial act of sentencing in part involves a curious (and vexed) approach to legal narrative.

Legal and Criminological Psychology, 2012

Purpose. In commenting on Youngs and Canter's (2012a) study, Ward (2012) raises concerns about offenders' personal narratives and their link to self-concepts and identity. His comments relate to explorations of personal life stories rather than the narratives of actual crimes that are the focus of Youngs and Canter's (2012a) study. The elaboration of this different focus helps to allay many of Ward's (2012) concerns and reveals further possibilities for developing the narrative approach within forensic psychology. Methods. The focus on offenders' accounts of a particular crime allows the development of a standard pro forma, the Narrative Role Questionnaire (NRQ), which deals with the roles a person thinks they played when committing a crime. These roles act as a summary of the criminal's offence narrative. Multivariate analysis of the NRQ clarifies the specific narrative themes explored by Youngs and Canter (2012a). Results. The examination of the components of the NRQ indicates that offence narratives encapsulate many psychological processes including thinking styles, selfconcepts, and affective components. This allows the four narrative themes identified by Youngs and Canter to provide the basis for rich hypotheses about the interaction between the dynamics of personal stories and identity. The four narratives of criminal action also offer a foundation for understanding the particular, detailed styles of offending action and the immediate, direct processes that act to instigate and shape these. Conclusion. These developments in our understanding of offence narratives generate fruitful research questions that bridge the concerns of investigative and correctional applications of narrative theory.

TEXT, 2013

This article tells the story of ‘The magistrate and Mr Moore’, a true account of an Australian magistrate’s experience of sentencing a man for drink driving, and then considers the significance of this story to the fields of socio-legal studies and narrative inquiry. Firstly, it explores how an ethnographic research approach – a sort of immersion journalism – is a productive methodology to access the under-researched area of judges’ experiences of sentencing people. Secondly, based on interviews with judges and magistrates in the criminal justice system in New South Wales, as well as, in some cases, observations of their working lives, the article explores the ways in which the judicial act of sentencing in part involves a curious (and vexed) approach to legal narrative.

The Emerald Handbook of Narrative Criminology, 2019

International journal of offender therapy and comparative criminology, 2016

A neglected area of research within criminality has been that of the experience of the offence for the offender. The present study investigates the emotions and narrative roles that are experienced by an offender while committing a broad range of crimes and proposes a model of criminal narrative experience (CNE). Hypotheses were derived from the circumplex of emotions, Frye, narrative theory, and its link with investigative psychology. The analysis was based on 120 cases. Convicted for a variety of crimes, incarcerated criminals were interviewed and the data were subjected to smallest space analysis (SSA). Four themes of CNE were identified: Elated Hero, Calm Professional, Distressed Revenger, and Depressed Victim in line with the recent theoretical framework posited for narrative offence roles. The theoretical implications for understanding crime on the basis of the CNE as well as practical implications are discussed.

The journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, 2011

In my commentary, I suggest that the criminal court is a place where justice examines tragedy, as described by Aristotle in his Poetics. I suggest that there are strong parallels with Aristotle's account of tragic narratives and the concepts of representation and performance of forensic expert testimony, as described by Griffith and Baranoski-especially in relation to the creation of voice. On this account, the forensic expert's psychiatric court report acts as a tragic narrative that makes defendants come alive as people. Such performance is crucial for the criminal justice process, where there are competing accounts of the truth, and the expert narrative can articulate the voice of different parties. However, there are other legal fora where the role of the forensic psychiatric voice may be less clear. I close by suggesting that we continue to need rich and subtle exploration of these topics, as exemplified by the work of Griffith and Baranoski.

Narrative Criminology

The movement toward narrative criminology is radical in its insights and implications. As a genuine departure from and viable alternative to mainstream criminology, the work showcased in this remarkable collection is likely to create serious waves in criminology that will be unruly and difficult to contain. The irony, of course, is that there is nothing radical about narrative criminology at all. Throughout this book, the authors draw on a sophisticated array of leading thought in psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and elsewhere. The so-called narrative turn in the social sciences (Brown et al. 1994) has characterized these other fields of enquiry for decades with its understanding, adopted from Sartre, that the human being is fundamentally a storytelling creature-or "homo narrativus" (Ferrand and Weil, 2001). Using the male-centered language of his time, Sartre ([1938] 1965, 61) wrote: "A man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were recounting it. " Over the last two decades, this notion that identity is an internal narrative has achieved a privileged place in the social sciences and humanities, with adherents like Paul Ricoeur, Dan McAdams, and Charles Taylor. The distinguished Harvard psychologist Jerome Bruner (1987, 15) argues: "Eventually the culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual experience, to organise memory, to segment and purpose-build the very 'events' of a life. In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we 'tell about' our lives. "

Criminology & Criminal Justice, 2018

This article offers a novel approach to the difficulties experienced by victims in relation to their social surroundings in general, and to justice processes in particular, by expanding on an emerging paradigm of narrative victimology. For victims, ownership of their narrative is a key element of their experience, but this ownership is contested. The article brings together a body of victimological literature drawn from social and personality psychology, criminology and sociology to illuminate mechanisms underlying possible tensions between victims’ narratives and other perspectives on their ordeal. These tensions are relevant to understanding secondary victimisation in the criminal justice processes, as well as to understanding the strengths and weaknesses of restorative justice as a possible avenue for meeting victims’ needs.

Aggression and Violent Behavior, 2016

Human beings are thought to have unique capacities to interpret and make meaning after major life events. However this process may be complicated and difficult after events that involve anger and aggression and when dangerousness and destructiveness come to the fore. Meaning making may be especially challenging when such an event is incomprehensible to the victim's family and society, due to the perpetrator's irreversible actions and the painful awareness that a human life has been lost. Meaning-making for the perpetrator, including owning of responsibility, in the aftermath of a serious and violent crime remains under-explored; perhaps this is because violent death is an extraordinary behavior with tragic consequences on the victim that invokes enormous anxiety at the thought of exploration. The aim of this paper is to draw upon criminological, forensic and psychology literature to provide a unified perspective on meaning-making processes and what meanings are made for and by the offender in the aftermath of homicide. From the perspective of the perpetrator, challenges might include how sense can be made of the tragedy, including how a redemptive story can emerge and in turn lead to pro-social identity changes. The paper concludes by highlighting consequences and lack of adjustment following incomprehensibility.