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  • Speaking of crime: Narratives of prisoners by Patricia E. O’Connor
  • Edwin Battistella
Speaking of crime: Narratives of prisoners. By Patricia E. O’Connor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000. Pp. 206.

Narrative is often a step in self-realization and personal growth. In Speaking of crime Patricia O’Connor draws on more than a dozen years of teaching and research in prisons and over 100 narratives of violence by prisoners in a maximum security prison in Washington, DC. O’C shows how inmates’ narratives and the narrative devices they employ in retelling their life events reveal their sense of agency, identity, and responsibility. She argues that the form of their narratives can provide important information about how they see their lives and how they interact in and out of prison.

The book begins with an introduction to prison research (1–12). This is followed by a chapter called ‘Getting into prison’ (13–37), which provides some background on the prison system in the United States and on theoretical issues relevant to narrative (drawing on work ranging from Foucault and Vygotsky to Labov and Goffman). Ch. 2, ‘Agency and verb position’ (38–74), deals with the representation of the individual as an agent in the description of events. O’C here shows how narrative may reveal an individual’s current attitude toward past events, as when an inmate deflects by referring to ‘catching a charge’ of robbery or ‘exchanging gunfire’ (rather than ‘getting caught stealing’ or ‘letting someone have it’).

Ch. 3, ‘Pronouns and agency’ (75–117), focuses on the referential slipperiness of the pronoun ‘you’ and on the significance of the narrative shift from ‘I’ to ‘you’. The chapter examines five stabbing narratives and an excerpt on stabbing from Jack Henry Abbott’s In the belly of the beast (New York: Random House, 1981) to explore the function of such pronoun shifts, which may serve to distance the speaker, involve the hearer, or position the speaker as observing a past self. Ch. 4, ‘Reflexive language and frame breaks’ (118–52), discusses ways prisoner-narrators manage and comment on discourse to make a story understandable and how this meta-discourse showcases their embedded thoughts and choices.

Ch. 5 is the study’s ‘Conclusions and implications’ (p. 153–72). Here the focus is on O’C’s view that narrative can be potentially rehabilitative. Engaging in new conversations with hearers whose background forces speakers to characterize and reflect on their actions and intentions is where the rehabilitative potential lies. O’C suggests that prisons allow more time for talk and set up pilot participatory discourse rehabilitation programs to involve inmates in discourses with noninmates. The book also has a short appendix with sample consent forms and the interview questionnaire.

Some aspects of the book will strike readers as inconclusive: There is the problem of how to interpret some narrative shifts (when, for example, is the shift from ‘I’ to ‘you’ an attempt to involve the listener in a constructed event or to distance the speaker from a painful or incriminating one?). And how do we assess the role of the observer’s paradox on narrative style? Nevertheless, there is plenty of thought-provoking analysis, and the book provides interesting glimpses of the framing that inmates have of their crimes and of prison life.

Edwin Battistella
Southern Oregon University
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