Book Review: Narrative criminology: Understanding stories of crime

• Author: Jacob Erickson,Andy Hochstetler
• Date: 01 September 2017
• Published date: 01 September 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567717710997
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

critiques, and questions about the ongoing need for the drug war presented through the cultural lens

of the methamphetamine imaginary that are essential and worthy of consideration. The end result is a

disconcerting and incredible view of the world as it is, at least through the lens of the methamphe-

tamine imaginary.

Presser, L., and Sandberg, S. (2015).

Narrative criminology: Understanding stories of crime. New York: New York University Press. vii, 305 pp. $30, ISBN

9781479823413.

Reviewed by: Jacob Erickson and Andy Hochstetler, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/1057567717710997

Ten empirical chapters and two conceptual summaries tell a tale of narrative criminology, a per-

spective created by the analysts of textual data. In Narrative Criminology: Understanding Stories of

Crime, Presser and Sandberg, the editors and also the authors of some sections, were flametenders of

a flicker from a new approach of interpreting talk that they term narrative criminology and nurtured

it into the mainstream. They were assisted by several of the scholars in this volume. Shadd Maruna

who made seminal contributions provides context about the perspective in the forward. He reminds

that the answer to why people offend often is found not in mathematical formulas, but stories.

Some of the cornerstones of the perspective and themes are found in classics on rationalization,

accounts, symbolic interactionist criminology, and subcultural perspectives of decades gone by.

Others are found in works predicting outcomes with textual data, still others in the phenomenology

of crime. Curmudgeonly, long-of-tooth skeptics might think there is nothing unique happening here.

Something is happening. Analytical attention to language and its meaning was not a focus for

most progenitors of qualitative criminology. This perspective is distinct in that regard; and the

chapters capture this uniqueness. Yes, all qualitative criminologists think that what people say is

important, but narrative criminologists contend that it is significantly purposive in complicated

ways. Analyses should extend beyond immediate biographical detail or factual descriptions of

incidents, and indeed, the perspective suggests the facticity of stories is secondary to their influence

on narrators and audiences. The perspective attends precisely to how things are said and why, rather

than stopping at codification of what was said. A key notion is that talk is constitutive of behavior. It

not only defends and makes sense of self and criminal action, often by explanation, but also inspires

or motivates offending. Narrative criminologists also keep in sight that humans are uniquely moral

creatures and use stories to generate, modify, and motivate moral selves. The organization of the

book coheres with this by presenting, in Part 1, works on the use of narrative to construct and defend

self and to seek goals; in Part 2, works on how narratives are constitutive of action in that they

animate and mobilize; and in Part 3, works highlighting creativity and flexibility in narratives with

attention to interview context.

When people are allowed to talk freely about why they do what they do, the layers for potential

analysis get complicated. Narrative approaches to analysis become especially challenging when the

examples and data are diverse, as is the case in this book. The chapters cover biblical narratives used

to motivate Native American removal in the U.S. Jacksonian period, Italian media representations of

tax evaders, a somewhat disjointed essay and memoir of thrill-seeking delinquency, homicides,

influences of gender on women’s methamphetamine use and addiction, prison experience for female

drug smugglers in an impoverished nation, reform and rehabilitation, some unpleasant aspects of

drug-induced hallucination, and what child molesters have to say for themselves.

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