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This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of an English medium-security prison housing men convicted of sex offences. It argues that victims haunted (Gordon, 2008) both the prison and the narratives of the men it held: they were ever-present in discourse, but depersonalised and lacking in agency. How prisoners described their victims said a great deal about how they sought to portray themselves, and the chapter makes this point by outlining three basic ‘types’ of story. In the first, the prisoner knew the victim well and deliberately sought to remember their suffering; at the same time, they themselves hoped not to be defined by their status as an offender. In the second, the victim was largely missing from the narrative, either because the prisoners barely remembered them or because the prisoners did not really consider them to be a victim. In the third type of story, the prisoners considered themselves to be the real victim, and considered the official victim as well as the criminal justice system to be responsible for their suffering. The chapter concludes by arguing victims were ghosts because the prison only allowed them to appear in certain ways. It suggests that narrative criminologists consider the relationship between narratives and justice, and that one way of doing this is to think about what stories don't communicate as well as what they do.

Most offender narrative being studied has been in oral forms, produced in the reciprocal process of researcher-(ex) offender interviews. This chapter offers an introduction to a variation of offender narrative study within the prison and rehabilitation context: the narrative of written autobiography. Since the early 1940s, Chinese reform institutions have required written autobiographies from new admitters, provided with clear presubscripted guidelines of instructions as well as postcensorship. For this chapter, we trace back and analyse this model based on 28 prisoners' autobiographies in mainland China between 2007 and 2009, as well as archive documents in different historical periods. We have found that the mandatory offender autobiographies are highly functional writings with clear requirements that embody the existing power structure. We have also found considerable commonality with findings in Western contexts on the presence and problems of narrative compliance in rehabilitation. We argue that narrative criminology should further engage in understanding the practice of narrative censorship and co-authorship in criminal justice processes, as it takes on different forms in different historical–social contexts.

This paper explores two museums in Taiwan, both former sites of incarceration, and asks how they reflect Taiwan’s evolving relationship with the past. Taiwan has successfully emerged from its authoritarian past into a democratic present; yet, it still bears the scars of its traumatic and violent history in the places where trauma and pain was exacted over Taiwanese people by different regimes. Two of these places are former prisons, now museums with common histories of incarceration, but very different approaches to presentation of traumatic pasts. This paper aims to understand the selective presentation of narratives of punishment in prison museums in Taiwan and what they reflect about Taiwan’s national identity.

This research used a qualitative ethnographic methodology, approaching prison museums as research sites with multidimensional textual, spatial and visual data. This study used a narrative ethnology approach to analyse the content, structure and social context surrounding the stories told about punishment at the sites.

While the Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park documents past abuses under the authoritarian Kuomindang Government (1945–1987), the narratives presented at the Chiayi Prison Museum, constructed under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), ignore past colonial violence. This study argues that the invisibility of past colonial violence in Chiayi prison museum acts to strengthen Taiwan’s multicultural national identity, while Jingmei WTMP acts to valorise political prisoners as heroic fighters for Taiwan’s democracy and human rights.

This research makes a contribution to the museum studies literature through extending understanding of the relationship between former carceral spaces and national identity projects.

Drawing inspiration from C Wright Mills exhortation to sociologists to locate themselves and their experiences in the ‘trends of their epoch’, I consider how first-hand experience of imprisonment can help criminology account for the growing trend towards the use of imprisonment in many Western democracies. Using interviews with a small group of British criminologists who have experience of imprisonment, I explore the connections between personal stories and collective narratives. Drawing reflexively from my own imprisonment, my subsequent professional trajectory and experiences of prison research, I consider the difficulties and potential of crafting a collective criminological project from disparate and profoundly personal experiences of imprisonment. The chapter combines methodological reflections on the use of autoethnography, autobiography and vignettes as a means to an end: establishing collective narratives from personal stories. I argue that the task of connecting these narratives to the ‘trends of the epoch’ that manifest in expanding prison populations is difficult but developing some momentum in convict criminology.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the use of a phototherapeutic technique called “Talking Pictures” within the forensic setting. This approach involves the use of a set of photographs to facilitate clients’ disclosure, self-growth and promote the development of positive self-narratives. The use of art therapies and the construction of adaptive identity narratives have been proven to support desistance and increase resocialization in the prison population.

A 42-year-old Italian male offender was met for six therapy sessions and invited to talk about his past, present and future through the use of photographs. Session transcripts were analysed using the software for linguistic analysis T-LAB.

Results show a progression in the language used during the sessions: in the beginning the client uses a denotative language with many concrete nouns and no emotional words, in subsequent sessions his speech begins to assume more symbolic connotations and emotional words are used to describe past traumas as well as to find new meanings to present events. Moreover, the fixity of the client’s self-image is contrasted with the emergence of new sides to his personality encompassing agency and self-worth.

The study is based on a single case, therefore results cannot be generalised to the prison population; moreover, the absence of any follow-up and standardized measurements of the client’s progression should be addressed by future research by both involving larger samples and including follow-up and quantitative measures of the study results.

The paper provides details on an innovative technique that might be used to explore the offenders’ goods and values and to develop truly redemptive rehabilitation programmes.

This paper adds to the scant literature on phototherapy in prisons and connects it with a reflection on desistance indicating that phototherapeutic interventions might be used to promote positive self-narratives, thus increasing desistance.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of prison experience in ex-political prisoners in Northern Ireland in the context of changing and conflicting master narratives.

A series of nine interviews were conducted with Loyalist and Republican political ex-prisoners in Northern Ireland. Eight were male and one was female. All had been in prison for substantial sentences relating to the Troubles.

This study highlighted the challenges faced by political ex-prisoners regarding the changing conflicting master narratives in Northern Ireland and identified how they deal with these challenges. The participants adapted to post-conflict society by attempting to understand and make sense of their experiences, including justifying their actions as appropriate for the era and identifying positive changes in society resulting from the conflict.

A narrative approach can be beneficial for understanding the experiences of political ex-prisoners. It enables a theoretical perspective to look not only at the personal but also at social elements of why people behave as they do. The findings demonstrate that political ex-prisoners do have different experiences to non-political ex-prisoners. The sample size was small and was drawn from a specific group of political ex-prisoners who were actively seeking reconciliation. The findings may be different for other groups.

A narrative approach can help the practitioner understand the context in which a person lives; ex-political prisoners may be very different from ordinary ex-prisoners because of the context in which they were imprisoned and the reasons for which they were imprisoned. They are likely to continue with the narrative of the conflict they fought in and may still have the same aims (e.g. Northern Ireland to become part of Ireland), though they may or may not believe in the same means. These are issues that should be discussed and elaborated when working with ex-political prisoners.

The master narratives active in the society into which the political ex-prisoner is released may impact the success or otherwise of their re-integration into society.

Understanding the role of conflicting master narratives in dealing with the implications of being an ex-political prisoner.

This research explores the subjective health experiences of women incarcerated in a provincial detention center in Ottawa, Canada.

Narrative interviews conducted with 16 previously incarcerated women were analyzed to explore how health issues shaped their experiences in detention.

Women identified a set of practices and conditions that negatively impacted health, including the denial of medication, medical treatment, and healthcare, limited prenatal healthcare, and damaged health caused by poor living conditions.

Findings suggest that structural health problems emerge in penal environments where healthcare is provided by the same agency responsible for incarceration. The incompatibility between the mandates of incarceration and healthcare suggests that responsibility for institutional healthcare should be transferred to provincial healthcare bodies.

This research responds to the lack of research on carceral health experiences within both penal scholarship and medical sociology, particularly in relation to women and those confined in jails.

Gender inequality and sexism are often at the root of domestic violence against women and children, with both serving to justify male domination. This runs in parallel with mother-blaming bias, which constitutes a pervasive common sense and scientific error derived from the myth of the good and the bad mother, characterising a large part of studies on deviance. The purpose of this paper is to consider the possible role of sexism in prisoners’ deviant biographies; for this, the authors considered the role of the mother in the biographies of prisoners, and the results lend support to the idea that mother-blaming is a serious fallacy. Starting from a critical psychology point of view and following the retrospective methodology, the authors interviewed 22 drug-addicted prisoners through Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) regarding their biographies and their relationships with parents and partners.

In the survey, the authors followed the same intention, and the results lend support to the idea that mother-blaming is a serious fallacy. The authors interviewed 22 drug-addicted prisoners through IPA concerning their biographies and their relationships with parents and partners.

The main result of this qualitative study was the recognition of a fundamental sexism assumed by participants, characterised by a paradox between the representation of the mother and the representation of the ideal woman. Despite the mother being their positive affective referent, and battered by her husband/partner, the same participants had been witnesses of domestic violence, and sometimes victims, they interiorised from their father an ambivalent sexism: benevolent sexism with regard to their mother and exhibited hostile sexism with their partner. On the one hand, it emerged that female empowerment was desirable with respect to the mothers. On the other hand, the ideal woman was exactly as their mother was, that is, being absolutely subordinated to men (a patient, caring, submissive housewife, totally dedicated to her children and her husband).

From a mainstream psychological perspective, the limits of the research are linked to the utilisation of the narrative method. Also, this methodology does not verify any hypotheses, so quotations from the participants are used to illustrate themes, and thus, it is difficult to report the informational complexities arising from the dialogues. However, the literature has emphasised that these limitations do not invalidate qualitative research findings, despite the difficulties in generalising the results of the qualitative studies. Thereafter, the critical analysis moved within the intersection of experience-centred approaches and the culturally oriented treatment of narratives, so that the focus on the stories of the prisoners makes meaning because it applies structure to experience, albeit, with the form and content of the texts. This research did not permit us to measure and evaluate post-hoc any post-traumatic hypotheses, which, in turn, would give room for further research. Another limitation of the research was that the relationship between culture of origin and gender biases, especially with participants from non-European countries, was not analysed. This topic would require an important in-depth study, which encompasses how women are treated in different countries and its effects on social maladjustment for immigrants in Italy.

The outcome of this study suggests that within similar structures in the Institute of Mitigated Custody, the theme of sexism should be considered in more depth. Since sexism justifies violence against women, and is therefore a factor that can cause recidivism in the antisocial behaviour of prisoners once they have served their sentences. It is important to allow them to analyse the relationship between their sexist attitudes, witnessing violence in childhood and the possibility of changing moral values of reference in favour of equality. This type of psychological intervention must necessarily be based not only on the elaboration of traumas suffered during childhood with an abusive father, but also on issues related to gender equality and the theme of social inclusion.

The study suggests the idea that male sexism can be a factor responsible for suffering and maladjustment for men and that therefore an education that promotes equality of gender differences can also help prevent the social distress associated with drug addiction and deviance.

The paper considers some cogent issues inherent to ambivalent sexism that pervades prisoners’ aspirations for their future.

This article is concerned with exploring the experience of black prisoners at HMP Grendon, the only prison in the country that operates wholly as a therapeutic community (TC).

The study involved undertaking semi‐structured interviews with 11 prisoners, all identifying themselves as “black”, who had committed a range of offences, as well as representing several geographical locations from the UK, Africa and the Caribbean. An adapted form of grounded theory was used to code the data collected from these interviews.

In total, four main themes emerged from the interviews undertaken: Grendon; Father deficit; Self‐concept; and Desistance.

Grendon may be the recipient of a culture of mistrust amongst black prisoners within the wider prison estate. Consequently, black prisoners' narratives could provide some much needed clarity on black prisoners operating from an “outsider within” perspective in the predominantly white TCs at Grendon.

The research suggested that elements of the prison's TC regime may not be culturally appropriate, appealing, or marketed correctly to black prisoners. This may be compounded by the social stigma attached to black men's mental health, combined with their overrepresentation within both the criminal justice and mental health systems.

While there is a developing body of knowledge of how prison TCs offer space for offenders to reflect, address, and then transform their offending behaviour, to date there has been limited consideration of the nature of the TC experience for black TC residents in the prison system of England and Wales. This article addresses this deficit.