Performing Desistance: The Counter Narrative

• In Event: Narrative Criminology IV: What Narratives of the State Do, and Doing Resistance

Abstract

When looking at black offenders and their desistance trajectories, whose narrative do we privilege? Desistance is increasingly conceptualised as a theoretical construct used to explain how offenders orient themselves away from committing crimes. However, to date there has been little work undertaken to examine how notions of ‘race, racialisation, and intersectionality’ enhances or impedes the desistance trajectories as told by black offenders themselves. Whilst racialisation centres on the social meaning attached to ‘race’, Intersectionality understands that human beings are shaped by the interaction of different social locations through a series of connected systems and structures of power, where independent forms of privilege and oppression are created. This paper calls for the development of ‘counter-narrative theatre’ (CNT) as a performative expression that provides a narrative space for black offender’s to ‘tell their own stories’ as both the ‘experts’ and ‘knowers’ of lived reality in relation to their criminality. It concludes by arguing that this ‘performed desistance narrative’ must both contest and transcend ‘criminological race neutrality’ and in doing so privilege the narrative of black offenders in relation to our understanding of crime as a whole.

Author

• Martin Glynn, Birmingham City University