Narrative Criminology

Explores the role of stories in criminal culture and justice systems around the world 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.

"Lois Presser and Sveinung Sandberg are onto something with this smart, beautifully organized collection of rich essays, each showing the importance of the & narrative turn not only to sociology and across disciplines, but to criminology. The collection shows how people involved with crime, and criminologists ourselves, use narrative all the time even though, until now, we may not have known why.This book is bound to be the & go to volume about the centrality of stories to the criminological enterprise.", "This is an impressively global collection of case studies. Together these demonstrate the flexibility, ubiquity and enduring utility of the concept of narrative for criminology. It is shown to be both an analytic tool for scholars and a resource shaping action and belief in the lifeworld. By exploring and highlighting these two properties this book provides a valuable service to cultural criminology.", "[The book] is positioned to draw on insights and methods from a vast field of inquiryand make the case for narrative as an important and putatively neglected perspectivefor understanding matters of crime and justice. In this volume, Lois Presser andSveinung Sandberg bring together a set of contributions designed to do just that.", "This is a most interesting, rather eclectic collection of papers presented within an allegedly new category of & narrative criminology. Essentially, the editors maintain the importance of storytelling for a better understanding of & crime, and, of course, are quite right to do so. Summing Up: Highly recommended."

Lois Presser is Professor of Sociology at the University of Tennessee. She is author or editor of four books including Inside Story: How Narrative Drive Mass Harm and Narrative Criminology, with Sveinung Sandberg. Sveinung Sandberg is Professor of Criminology and Sociology at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is author, co-author, or editor of several books, including Street Capital: Black Cannabis Dealers in a White Welfare State and Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime, with Lois Presser.