“I got caught,but I’m not a loser”: Moral economy and arrest narratives in China's heroin trade

Abstract

Narrative criminology illuminates identity change but less often examines how accounts mobilize moral resources across moral orders. This article reads arrest narratives through a moral-economy lens and introduces co-legibility: the capacity of stories to be readable both in drug-market rules and mainstream respectability. Data are life-course interviews with 18 former heroin dealers and 6 former drug enforcement officers in China, analyzed narratively and thematically. Three practices structure arrest accounts: betrayal (being led in or sold out), loyalty (refusing to implicate others) and “the last time” (intent to stop framed through calculation and restraint). Narratives align drug-market norms—anti-informing, non-implication, reputation, calculation, and self-control—with mainstream notions of keeping one's word, responsibility, care for kin, and not harming others, assembling a morally acceptable self. The analysis treats credibility as a relational fit with a moral order of obligation and sanction, rather than textual style, and offers moral resources and co-legibility as tools for comparing such accounts across settings without judging their real-world acceptance.