Do Intersectional Variations Shape Prisoners’ Understanding of Their Past Lives? An Examination of the Stock Narratives of Persistent Offenders

Abstract

Narratives have returned as an important resource for understanding how prisoners make sense of their lives. However, as a number of scholars have pointed out, these narratives do not emerge sui genersis; they are drawn from social constructs and cultural genres available to individuals. Using data gathered from a Life History Calendar and a modification of Canter and Youngs (2015) Life as a Film, we investigate whether the multiple locations individuals occupy (based on their race and gender) influence their narrative accounts and the contribution of both social structure and agency to these accounts. Our analyses of the narratives of 95 male and female persistent offenders’ (of whom 30 are Black and 65 are White) reveal the structural disadvantages, and advantages, they had experienced as well as the narrative tropes they deemed to be culturally relevant given their race and gender.

Keywords:

• Narrative analysis
• intersectionality
• persistent offenders

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Phil Goodman (Co-PI on the project) and Natlalia Bittencourt Otto and Megan Dawe for their help with coding. Additionally, the reviewers provided excellent comments that improved the final paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Candace Kruttschnitt is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. She is the author and editor of several books and government reports related to female offending, victimization and imprisonment.

Timothy Kang is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His research interests include life-course criminology, particularly the process of desistance during the transition to adulthood.

Notes

1 Respondents were told that they had been selected at random for a study designed to investigate whether there are particular social relationships and life events that influence the criminal careers of men and women and how men and women like themselves characterize their life experiences. Respondents were informed that their participation was entirely voluntary and that they would not be compensated for their participation in the interview. At the close of each interview we also asked them for permission to examine their official criminal histories (which included a signed consent form).

2 See the Appendix for further details about our interview protocol.

3 Our analyses focused on the intersection of race and gender. We, unfortunately, did not have accurate measures of other social dimensions, most notably class. While in a limited number of cases, we might be able to infer that a given respondent came from a somewhat privileged background, the vast majority of our respondents came from impoverished backgrounds. As such, we could not systematically address the effects of race, gender and class with these data.

4 The names we use throughout this portion of the analysis are fictitious.