Imposed stories : prisoner self-narratives in the criminal justice system in New South Wales, Australia

Maggie Hall, Kate Rossmanith

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

This article examines the ways in which offenders are required to provide very particular accounts of themselves and to self-narrate in confined ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in the New South Wales justice system, it explores how the stories that offenders are made to accept and tell about themselves often bear little relationship to their own reflections. It analyses how, despite the expectations of judges and prison authorities, these self-narratives are not products of an offender's soul-searching concerning his past actions and experience; rather they are products of an official legal narrative being imposed on an offender whose capacity to own and enact such a narrative is already seriously compromised.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)38-51
Number of pages14
JournalInternational Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy
Volume5
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Open Access - Access Right Statement

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). As an open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non‐commercial settings.

Keywords

  • Australia
  • ethnology
  • prisons
  • rehabilitation

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