The Rapist and the Proper Criminal: Exclusion of Immoral Others as Narrative Work on the Self
Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of Crime. L. Presser and S. Sandberg (eds), New York & London: NYU Press 2015.
26 Pages Posted: 30 Oct 2015
Date Written: October 27, 2015
Abstract
Understood as a moral space, a prison symbolically positions its prisoners as a group of 'immoral others'. Everyday life behind bars has numerous ways of communicating that most basic of the prison's messages to its prisoners: you are not to be trusted. The result is that prisoners day in and day out are reminded of the fact that being a prisoner is being a member of a group of immoral people who cannot be trusted. Many prisoners experience this ascribed group affiliation as an attack on their self-image, and thus as one of the pains of imprisonment (Sykes, 1958). They are frustrated by and often protest against this institutionalized lack of trust. Reacting to the unwanted change of moral status imprisonment entails, many prisoners claim that the fact that one has broken a rule does not mean that one has no rules. This chapter explores one of the strategies prisoners employ to adapt to and assuage this particular pain of imprisonment. This chapter will analyze how practices of exclusion and hierarchy building may be interpreted as part of the self's work on itself. I will show how narratives about violence against and exclusion of rapists and sex offenders are used by prisoners to counter the ascribed stigma of immorality and symbolically reposition themselves as morally conscious proper criminals. The rapist, a narrative figure common in prisoner culture, is used to signify true evil in stark contrast to a narrator thus repositioned as a proper criminal with strong moral fiber. A bi-product is an important distinction between two types of crime: the rational (and defendable) crimes of the proper criminals and the immoral horrors perpetrated by the 'rapist monsters'.
Keywords: prison ethnography, penology, narrative criminology, techniques of the self, techniques of neutralization
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