Narratives of normality: Finnish prisoners envisioning their future

Abstract

The ambition of living ‘a normal life’ appears to be common among prisoners prior to release. Besides portraying for the life desired upon release, the notion of a normal life can say something about what the persons aspiring to it thinks of their present life, what they want their life to be like in future, and what they consider attainable. This article explores the subjective and social considerations of prisoners’ desires for normality. Qualitative interviews with prisoners at low-security open prisons in Finland ( N = 45) revealed three narratives of normality: (1) nostalgic normality, balancing the disruption caused by imprisonment; (2) imagined normality, envisioning a future life script; (3) challenging views of normality, which is still desired, but whose legal and conventional norms are contested. While prison authorities and prisoners generally idealize normality in terms of conduct, prisoners’ stories reveal that they utilize the notion for a number of reasons. The personal narratives of normality can function as genuine and strategic expressions of conformity or resistance. In their narratives, the prisoners disclose the obstacles to normality that they anticipate, showing the uncertainty behind their simple wish to “just live a normal life.”

Radical hope and processes of becoming: Examining short-term prisoners’ imagined futures in England & Wales and Norway

“…Visions of future personhood often evolved into considerations of how the interviewees’ life interconnected with those of others relationally. Similar to Seed's analysis of long-term imprisonment, I found that this imaginative and ‘narrative labour’ (Warr, 2020) was ‘not a reaffirmation of who one was , or a doubling down on beliefs one held before entering prison, but a reassessment of who one will be going forward’ (Seeds, 2021: 13, emphases in original). Hjalmar, for example, longed to be a person his family would ‘miss’ when he died (Hjalmar, EE1, Norway).…”

“…Hope has the capacity to animate a person's 'moral ambitions to do better and be better; it orients and shapes [his or her] autonomy' (Brownlee, 2021: 597). We know that most people who have committed an offence hope and yearn to 'make good' (Maruna, 2001), lead conventional lives and that almost everyone stops offending eventually (Halsey et al, 2017;Harris, 2011;McNeill, 2018;Nugent and Schinkel, 2016;Shapland and Bottoms, 2011;Villman, 2021). However, the sociology of imprisonment recognizes both the potential benefits and tragedy of hoping.…”

Anticipated citizenship in the shadow of imprisonment

“…Imprisonment had either disrupted or damaged citizenship for many participants, with some feeling their potential citizenship had received such irreparable damage it had been entirely lost, making an imagined future citizen self no longer attainable. Just as imprisonment ‘disrupted their normal life’ (Villman, 2021: 8), for some, imprisonment had also disrupted their prior engagement as ‘active citizens’ outside which they hoped, albeit with apprehension about the hurdles involved, to return to. Several participants described how they had been involved in what they saw as positive and meaningful citizenship before incarceration, whether through paid employment, running businesses, or voluntary contributions to local communities.…”

“…The desire to live a ‘normal’ life is prevalent in prisoners’ narratives about their post-release futures. Many aspire to the humble stability of a crime-free existence and conventional work and home life, their imprisonment being perceived as in opposition to such ‘normalcy’ (Villman, 2021). In this study, narratives of ‘normal life’ and citizenship were intimately connected, with participants frequently understanding citizenship as synonymous with normality.…”

“…In this respect, narratives of anticipated citizenship were intricately linked with narratives of desistance or recidivism, with perceptions of one's ability to have an affective sense of being a citizen on release (Kallio et al, 2020) as contingent on their ability to stay away from offending. Such future aspirational citizenship narratives were often constructed similarly to the ‘imagined normality’, that Villman (2021: 10) found to be used for the creation of a believable story for one's future.…”