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Conflicting
Narratives of Crime
and Punishment
Edited by
Martina Althoff
Bernd Dollinger
Holger Schmidt
Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment
Martina Althoff · Bernd Dollinger ·
Holger Schmidt
Editors
Conflicting
Narratives of Crime
and Punishment
Editors
Martina Althoff Bernd Dollinger
Department of Criminal Law Department of Education & Psychology
& Criminology University of Siegen
University of Groningen Siegen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
Groningen, The Netherlands
Holger Schmidt
Department of Social Education,
Adult Education and Early Childhood
Education (ISEP)
TU Dortmund University
Dortmund, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Contents
Section I Foundation
v
vi Contents
Index 279
Notes on Contributors
ix
x Notes on Contributors
Erlbaum Associates, 1998. She has supervised and carried out the
research programme ‘Intertextuality in judicial settings’, with a focus on
the interrelations between talk and written documents in police inter-
rogations and criminal trials. This has resulted in the book The Suspect’s
Statement: Talk and Text in the Criminal Process, Cambridge University
Press, 2019.
Patrik Müller-Behme is a research assistant at Kassel University,
Department of Human Sciences, Institute of Social Policy and Social
Welfare. His fields of research are social problems and social control,
qualitative research and discourse analysis.
Holger Schmidt is Assistant Professor at the TU Dortmund
University. His research interests are deviance and (youth-)crime, pris-
ons, processes of social differentiation and inequalities, biographical
and—small surprise—narrative research.
Daniel Stein is Professor of North American Literary and Cultural
Studies at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is the author of
Music Is My Life: Louis Armstrong, Autobiography, and American Jazz
(University of Michigan Press, 2012) and, most recently, co-editor
of Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective,
1830s–1860s (Palgrave, 2019).
Hannah Thurston is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology at the
University of Brighton. Her research interests include punishment in
the USA and the American cultural identity; qualitative and interpre-
tative methodologies with a focus on narrative analysis; and the use of
museums as research sites. More specifically though, her recent research
has focused on the ‘Lone Star State’ and its reputation for harsh pun-
ishment. To this end, she has analysed the myths and memories which
underpin the Texan self-identity and considered these in relation to the
narratives at work in Texan punishment museums. She continues to
explore how cultural memories of crime and justice draw on—and feed
back into—wider scripts and stories of collective identity.
Zachary Wipff received his B.A. in psychology from Clark University
with highest honours. In his senior thesis, Activity & Passivity, he for-
mulated a narrative theory of psychological agency. He is currently
Notes on Contributors xiii
xv
xvi List of Figures
Fig. 6.7 Cabinets filled with inmate arts and crafts: Texas Prison
Museum 129
Fig. 6.8 Cabinets filled with inmate arts and crafts: Texas Prison
Museum 130
Fig. 6.9 Cabinets filled with inmate arts and crafts: Texas Prison
Museum 130
1
Fighting for the “Right” Narrative:
Introduction to Conflicting Narratives
of Crime and Punishment
Martina Althoff, Bernd Dollinger
and Holger Schmidt
Introduction
Narratives are a constitutive part of the talk of crime. Whenever an
event is interpreted as “crime” and reactions to it are determined, sto-
ries are established. Events are described, responsibilities ascribed,
M. Althoff (*)
Department of Criminal Law & Criminology,
University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
e-mail: m.althoff@rug.nl
B. Dollinger
Department of Education & Psychology,
University of Siegen, Siegen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
e-mail: bernd.dollinger@uni-siegen.de
H. Schmidt
Department of Social Education, Adult Education
and Early Childhood Education (ISEP), TU Dortmund University,
Dortmund, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany
e-mail: holger3.schmidt@tu-dortmund.de
© The Author(s) 2020 1
M. Althoff et al. (eds.), Conflicting Narratives of Crime and Punishment,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47236-8_1
2
M. Althoff et al.
Narratives
Our starting point is the observation that for a narrative understand-
ing of crime it is necessary to consider conflicts or questions of hegem-
ony and subversion to a greater extent than has hitherto been the case.
In order to explain this more closely in the following, we first describe
our view on narratives, then we go into more detail on conflicts or
rather the question of what can or should be regarded as hegemonic or
subversive.
So what do we understand by narratives? First, it should be noted
that there is little consensus on this term (Ryan 2008a). Narratives are
understood very differently. Nevertheless, key points that are often asso-
ciated with narratives can be stated, such as that they are a special form
of linguistic (or textual) communication. To place narratives (or stories,
as used synonymously here) at the centre of analysis follows a linguistic
turn that does not merely see communication as a representation of a
non-verbal reality, but ascribes a particular intrinsic value to narratives
(Nash 1990). The currently growing interest of criminologists in stories
and storytelling goes back to the assumption that narratives create a spe-
cific form of crime reality: they are to be taken seriously because they
constitute crime as such or at least make it communicable without sim-
ply depicting it (Presser 2009). Accordingly, crime is not spoken about,
but crime is spoken. There may be “objective” events, e.g. physical actions
1 Fighting for the “Right” Narrative …
3
that lead to the injury of one person by another. However, such events
only become “violence” or “crime” if they are related in a special way.
This relation concerns form and content:
In formal terms, certain conditions must be met for crime to be nar-
rated. Events must be given a certain form so that they can be narra-
tively understood and represented as crime. With reference to narrative
theories (e.g. Bruner 1991; De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012; Ewick
and Silbey 1995; Polletta et al. 2011) we emphasise three formal
aspects: relationally connected participants, activities, and characteris-
tics; a relatively high communicative value, and a temporal sequence.
Firstly, narratives of crime provide relationally connected partici-
pants including peculiarities attributed to them such as responsibility,
motives, and actions (Dollinger 2020): perpetrators harm others, vic-
tims suffer, policemen investigate. Offenders bear responsibility, victims
do not. Offenders have a motive, victims usually do not. Without such
actors, activities and characteristics, one can hardly speak of “crime”
(Watson 1976). Secondly, narratives mark an event with these partici-
pants and attributes as something special, because the event is worth tell-
ing. Narratives assign events a value of “tellability” (Ryan 2008b): minor
events are not told, but dealt with as routine or they are—at most—
reported, but not related to as a story; if there is a story for an event, it
has to be of interest to a more or less large circle of people. Something
has happened that is worth becoming the subject of a story. Criminality
often has a particularly high tellability; in media and politics, crime is a
recurring theme (e.g. Greer 2005; Simon 2007; Surette 2011). Thirdly,
as a narrative, an event is given the form of a temporal course (Labov
and Waletzky 1967). If no change over time becomes apparent, it would
not make sense to speak of a story; it is the most important formal
characteristic for identifying narratives. Narratives imply movement or
change, whereby in the case of crime the time-bound actions of people
(sometimes of organisations or institutions) are communicated: some-
thing is stolen; someone is murdered, deceived, injured, lied to, aborted,
betrayed, and much more. What these very different forms of action
have in common is the assumption of a temporal sequence. The situ-
ation before the narrated event is different from the situation after the
4
M. Althoff et al.
semantics that are accessible to others and that can be used by them to
explore and evaluate the meaning of a crime story. And besides institu-
tional and individual narratives, the dependence on context is also true
in the case of public or collective narratives, i.e. crime stories that are,
for example, told by the media who cannot (arbitrarily) reinvent new
stories. Instead, media agents compile the material available to them
(Althoff 2018). The very different contexts of storytelling make it pos-
sible to assume conflicts or at least a high potential for disagreement,
as there are manifold situations and institutional or everyday contexts
in which crime is discussed. Whoever tells a crime story has to direct it
towards the respective contexts and the relevant audiences so that it is,
and can be, perceived as a “convincing story”. It is precisely because nar-
ratives aim to persuade and to negate alternative ways of telling an event
that conflicts are of central importance for a narrative analysis of crime.
1916
1916.
Talvipäivän painuessa.
Te talvisen taivaanrannan puut, mitä tiedätte meistä, elon
hallavan hankihin eksyneistä? Punakeltaiset saaret ja salmein
suut, miten katsotte miestä, jok' on kantanut ain ilonkaipuunsa
iestä?
Se painui, kun petti mun ystävä ylin; minut jätti hän yöhön
ja päivien päättömien pakkotyöhön. Vain talven nyt tunnen ja
pakkasen sylin, ah, aurinko meni, mene pois, mene pois, polo
rakkauteni!
Ritarit.
1916
Kalypson saari.
1917.
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