Re-writing punishment? Songs and narrative problem-solving

TY - JOUR

T1 - Re-writing punishment? Songs and narrative problem-solving

AU - Thomas, Phil Crockett

AU - McNeill, Fergus

AU - Frödén, Lucy Cathcart

AU - Scott, Jo Collinson

AU - Escobar, Oliver

AU - Urie, Alison

N1 - © The Author(s) 2021.

PY - 2021/3

Y1 - 2021/3

N2 - This article analyses findings from the Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council (ESRC/AHRC)-funded ‘Distant Voices – Coming Home’ project (ES/POO2536/1), which uses creative methods to explore crime, punishment and reintegration. Focusing on songs co-written in Scottish prisons, we argue that the songs serve to complicate and substantiate our grasp of what state punishment does to people, as well as perhaps affording their prison-based co-writers both moments and modalities of resistance to dominant narratives within criminal justice. In doing so, they creatively express and explore affective and perhaps even unconscious aspects of the self. We argue that our work contributes to a more expansive and considered treatment of narrative in criminology; one that admits and engages with a more diverse and creative range of expressions of experience and selfhood, all of them partial and some of them contradictory. By attending to diverse kinds of narratives embodied in these songs, we learn more about what criminalisation, penalisation and incarceration do to people and to their stories.

AB - This article analyses findings from the Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council (ESRC/AHRC)-funded ‘Distant Voices – Coming Home’ project (ES/POO2536/1), which uses creative methods to explore crime, punishment and reintegration. Focusing on songs co-written in Scottish prisons, we argue that the songs serve to complicate and substantiate our grasp of what state punishment does to people, as well as perhaps affording their prison-based co-writers both moments and modalities of resistance to dominant narratives within criminal justice. In doing so, they creatively express and explore affective and perhaps even unconscious aspects of the self. We argue that our work contributes to a more expansive and considered treatment of narrative in criminology; one that admits and engages with a more diverse and creative range of expressions of experience and selfhood, all of them partial and some of them contradictory. By attending to diverse kinds of narratives embodied in these songs, we learn more about what criminalisation, penalisation and incarceration do to people and to their stories.

KW - Punishment

KW - imprisonment

KW - reintegration

KW - creative methods

KW - songwriting

KW - narrative

KW - narrative criminology

U2 - 10.1177/26326663211000239

DO - 10.1177/26326663211000239

M3 - Article

SN - 2632-6663

VL - 2

SP - 1

EP - 19

JO - Incarceration

JF - Incarceration

IS - 1

ER -