Re-writing punishment? Songs and narrative problem-solving

Abstract

This article analyses findings from the Economic and Social Research Council/Arts and Humanities Research Council (ESRC/AHRC)-funded ‘Distant Voices – Coming Home’ project (ES/POO2536/1), which uses creative methods to explore crime, punishment and reintegration. Focusing on songs co-written in Scottish prisons, we argue that the songs serve to complicate and substantiate our grasp of what state punishment does to people, as well as perhaps affording their prison-based co-writers both moments and modalities of resistance to dominant narratives within criminal justice. In doing so, they creatively express and explore affective and perhaps even unconscious aspects of the self. We argue that our work contributes to a more expansive and considered treatment of narrative in criminology; one that admits and engages with a more diverse and creative range of expressions of experience and selfhood, all of them partial and some of them contradictory. By attending to diverse kinds of narratives embodied in these songs, we learn more about what criminalisation, penalisation and incarceration do to people and to their stories.

Miller R, Halfway Home: Race, Punishment and the Afterlife of Mass Incarceration

“…I argued in that blog-post, and argue still, that it is an obligation of any democratic state that punishes to ensure that punishment ends. Yet, as Halfway Home demonstrates so vividly, the ‘penal state’ or carceral state (Garland, 2013), however messy, fragmented and contested it may be (Rubin and Phelps, 2017), produces not re/integration but instead a ‘supervised society’ in which multiple forms of exclusion and disenfranchisement leave people in the condition Miller calls ‘carceral citizenship’ (Miller and Stuart, 2017). I was exercised enough by the memories of that day – and by the way that it provoked me to think afresh about reintegration in my own country (Scotland) to argue that:‘…we need to build a movement that is about rehabilitation and reentry (and of course mass incarceration and mass supervision) as civil and human rights issues, and not just about how people and their communities can support one another to manage the consequences of the State's dereliction of duty [to reintegrate].’…”

A pedagogy of ‘public criminology’ as a counter to marginality? Lessons for community sanctions and measures from the Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“…For Crockett Thomas et al (2021), song-writing can also be utilised to explore personal experiences through narrative problem-solving, not least because it provides spaces within which artists can explore alternative selves (see also McNeill, 2019). They demonstrate how songs co-produced with Scottish prisoners offer insight into 'the relationships between narratives, the contexts and conditions of production and the pursuit of justice' (Crockett Thomas et al, 2021: 14).…”

“…The value of music lies not only in the expression of individual narratives, but also in articulating the wider social consequences of the criminal justice system. Hip-hop, in particular, offers a wealth of possibilities for a pedagogy of CSM (Crockett Thomas et al, 2021). My RO seminars often drew upon hip-hop to shine a light on those with lived experience of the criminal justice system and emphasise the dialogic potential of creative forms of 'ordinary' knowledge.…”

“…And yet, this marginalisation is a relatively recent phenomenon. Criminology emerged in the late-nineteenth century; as a field of knowledge, its influence was drawn from the positivism of disciplines like statistics, psychiatry, and phrenology, for which the prison functioned as an ‘experimental laboratory, a controlled enclosure in which the new knowledge could develop’ (Garland, 1985: 79). That criminology's subject matter, ‘crime’, is defined by the state renders it unique among fields: questions of who is criminal and how they should be treated are intimately entwined with political ideology (Moore, forthcoming).…”

“…That criminology's subject matter, ‘crime’, is defined by the state renders it unique among fields: questions of who is criminal and how they should be treated are intimately entwined with political ideology (Moore, forthcoming). Formative, institutionally-based criminologist-practitioners were, therefore, able to exert influence over states’ penal practises in the late-nineteenth century, particularly regarding the regulation of the lower classes (Garland, 1985).…”