Starting from the premise that experience is narratively constituted and actions are oriented through the self as the protagonist in an evolving story, narrative criminology investigates how narratives motivate and sustain offending. Reviewing narrative criminological research, this paper contends that narrative criminology tends toward a problematic dualism of structure and agency, locating agency in individual narrative creativity and constraint in structure and/or culture. This paper argues for a different conceptualisation of narrative as embodied, learned and generative, drawing on Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Social action, which here includes storytelling, is structured via the habitus, which generates but does not determine social action.This theorisation understands structures and representations as existing in duality, according a more powerful role to storytelling. The paper concludes by discussion the implications of such a shift for narrative interventions toward offending.Key words: narrative criminology; structure; agency; Bourdieu; offending. Telling the story is not merely about loosening social ties to excuse his deviance, as neutralisation theory would suggest (Sykes and Matza 1968), but a deeper search for meaning and identity. Whereas neutralisations are highly strategic the narrative habitus conveys the way that narratives are natural and logical; the sense that the story could never have been otherwise. These characteristics of a narrative, its enduring nature, its connection to a life lived in a particular time and place, can be summed up in the notion of the narrative habitus.Narrative criminology examines the complex narrative work undertaken by offenders (Presser 2009). Some of the best work pays close attention to the importance of social structure in shaping the narratives that motivate and sustain offending. Yet, scholarship has tended to rely on a dualistic conceptualisation of structure/agency. If narrative criminology is to 1 Interestingly for narrative theorists, his account is explicitly literary; fragmented rather than chronological. The central concern is to quite literally decode the meaning of his lyrics for the reader. This representation is fundamentally an interpretation, rather than mere representation. He states: "I saw it note a tension between the apparently fluidity of narratives and the 'historical weight' of social structures, arguing that: 'A primary limitation of a discursive treatment of such inequalities is that structure needs to be understood beyond that which is "constantly produced from moment to moment"' (Miller et al. 2015: 92). Whilst narrative criminology perhaps inevitably brackets off objective social realities to focus closely on text, it has never insisted that narratives take primacy.Narrative criminology can engage with the 'real' world whilst also maintaining its distinct focus on subjectivity and narrative, but doing so entails bridges troublesome dualisms: the 'real world' and subjective experiences; speaking and doing; material and symbolic;...

Abstract:The work of Bourdieu has increasingly gained interest in criminology. This theoretical framework is rich and arguably the most sophisticated approach to social inequality and difference in sociology. It has however, been criticized for bias towards the structural aspects of social life, and for leaving little space for the constitutive, and creative role of language. We argue for the inclusion of narrative for understanding street fields. Based on qualitative interviews with 40 incarcerated drug dealers in Norway, we describe the narrative repertoire of the street field, including stories of crime business, violence, drugs, and the 'hard life'. The narrative repertoire is constituted by street capital, but also upholds and produces this form of capital.Street talk is embedded in objective social and economic structures and displayed in the actors' habitus. Narratives bind the street field together: producing social practices and social structure.

This paper offers a rare insight into women's experiences dealing crack cocaine. Drawing on interviews with eight women, this research finds that, although the retail-level crack trade is male dominated, it is not simply a man's world. This paper examines the strategies that successful female dealers employed, demonstrating that women reflexively took their gender into account to made cognizant choices about what, when and how to deal. Dealing strategies were a response not solely to the gendered nature of the drug market but also to women's gendered social positions, relationships and identities. Performing respectable femininity was a key strategy for keeping dealing hidden and keeping out of trouble. This paper is underpinned by the concept of 'doing gender'.

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Calls to defund the police emerged from Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests of 2020, inspiring USA cities to shift funding from policing to social welfare. Here we consider how defunding might translate to the UK, raising critical questions about our distinct funding arrangements, and social welfare traditions. Next, we consider how the spirit of defunding could be adapted in the UK drawing on the left realist proposition of minimal policing, radically restricting police powers and autonomy. In contrast to many abolitionists, we foresee the state continuing to play an important role in ensuring justice through the development of specialist non-police led agencies to respond to serious crimes and residual conflicts.