Beyond “Pleasant Lies”: Exploring “Fictionalizing Tendencies” in Family Members' Narratives of Men Incarcerated for Violent Offenses

• In Event: Narrative Criminology #1: Narratives Doing and Undoing Crime

Abstract

Researchers have examined how perpetrators of harm—and even those close to them—grapple with moral questions related to culpability and victimhood, often by developing excuses and justifications that “neutralize” (Sykes and Matza, 1957) the damage inflicted. In this article, I use 18 in-depth interviews of family members of men incarcerated for a violent offense to explore the “fictionalizing tendencies” (Goldie, 2012) evident in participants’ accounts of their loved ones’ actions. Drawing on scholarship in philosophy and literary theory, I illuminate how the imposition of a narrative structure more commonly found in fiction facilitated family members’ sense-making processes as they confronted the harm their loved ones were accused of inflicting on others. These findings reveal how family members’ narrative work extends beyond the “pleasant lies” (Maruna, 2001: 145) commonly found in the stories of people trying to make sense of a bad situation, and they speak to the tensions embedded in narratives that aspire to truth despite being inherently perspectival.

Author

• Janani Umamaheswar, George Mason University