Homicide is among the most serious crimes and, consequently, it is punished with some of the longest prison sentences. The analysis of the narratives of perpetrators has shed some light on how offenders manage guilt, understand violence, and rationalize the event. This paper draws upon field data (narrative interviews and lifelines drawn by participants) from CRIMLA Project. By analyzing the life stories of an heterogeneous sample of homicide perpetrators in Argentina and Chile, this study shows that death and inflicted harm is downplayed in the reconstructions of most perpetrators, illustrating a tendency to invisibilize and ignore the victims themselves. Contrastingly, offenders justified and excused the harm caused to the victims’ relatives, evaluated the impact of their action on their own families and friends and, mainly, focused their stories on the self-provoked harm on their own lives as a consequence of being imprisoned. This narrative pattern reveals the ways in which these actors evaluate lethal violence, highlighting the impact on their social circle and downplay its effect on the victims. The outweigh of incarceration over violence is illustrated by the fact that in their lifelines prison is predominantly labeled as a turning-point, over the crime itself. This paper discusses how violence is rationalized, the possibility of redemption narratives, and the hegemonic stories which condition how killing is signified.
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EXPLORING LIFE COURSES AND LIFE STORIES
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The epidemic psychology of pandemics creates an atmosphere of panic and fear that can expedite new laws and facilitate criminogenic narrative arousal. Using narrative criminology, we discuss crimes that emerged from pandemic narratives in the early phases of the disease in Mexico. We show how pandemic master narratives have unexpected criminogenic effects; can be negotiated to make them criminogenic; and are opposed by more fundamentally criminogenic counter-narratives. We also show how pandemics repurpose justifications for traditional crimes and offer an opportunity for narrative repositioning of “criminals”. Societal crises intensify the continuous narrative negotiation that always underlies the meaning of crime. Pandemics can therefore act as a prism through which social scientists can see how crime is an ongoing narrative accomplishment.
Facing the Covid-19 pandemic, prisons in Mexico City prohibited visits. This sparked clearly gendered protests: male prison inmates complained that the restrictions left them without resources to deal with prison shortages, while women complained that it prevented them from sending resources to their families. Based on data from life story interviews conducted before the pandemic, we explore visits, prison work, and gendered child-rearing practices in Mexican prisons. We argue that incarcerated mothers adopt a provider role in prison, in contrast to incarcerated fathers, who abandon this traditionally masculine fatherhood role. Suspension of visits thus have distinctly gendered consequences.
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