Punishment as text

Abstract

Punishment is often performed through judicial texts. Narrative criminology scholarship, however, has paid little attention to how criminalised people engage with these texts when constructing their self-narratives. To fill this gap, based on qualitative findings from formerly incarcerated people in Israel, this paper aimed to theorise their engagement with their sentencing remarks (SR). We found that they experienced their SR as text that held communicative, transformative and physical dimensions. The findings showed that SR impacted criminalised persons by individualising the penal dialogue, transforming their identity, and serving as objects for performing rituals during their imprisonment and upon release. The findings contribute to an understanding of the connection between judicial work and incarcerated people's desistance and identity-making processes through the textual bridge of SR.

Introduction

The legal performance of punishment often involves texts. Sentencing remarks (SR), pre-sentence reports and parole-board decisions are a few examples of texts that may hold dramatic meaning for criminalised people and their families, crime victims and other audiences (e.g., prosecutors, probation officers). The analysis of legal texts – and judicial texts in particular – stands at the heart of criminal law scholarship (Zedner 2011). Whilst criminologists dedicate considerable interest to exploring criminalised people's narratives and their meaning for their penal experience and desistance process (Brookman 2015; Copes 2016; Dollinger and Heppchen 2019; Maruna and Liem 2021; Maruna 2011; Presser and Sandberg 2019; Quinn and Goodman 2022; Warr 2020), the criminological meaning of judicial texts for those narratives has been under-researched. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap, by expanding narrative criminology scholarship to the ‘juridical field’ where we explore the textual meaning of SR for criminalised people's narrative-making (Fleetwood 2016). We do so by analysing and theorising the relationship between such individuals and the textual dimensions of their SR.

SR constitute the communication of punishment in many common-law systems (e.g., Australia, England and Wales, Scotland). Once the sentencing judge has decided the convicted person's sentencing, that individual is brought to the courtroom for the sentencing hearing. There, the judge delivers the SR orally; they are often also given in writing. The written text of the SR is either a written transcript that recorded the oral remarks in court (usual in several common law systems) or a formal written text (common in continental systems) (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Campos-Pardillos 2022; Sullivan 2017). Whilst SR may address several audiences, they primarily focus upon and serve as operative texts for criminalised people, communicating the specific punishment that these individuals will serve (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Campos-Pardillos 2022). The exact nature of SR varies according to judicial style, ideology and socio-cultural context, the crime's severity, or the criminalised individual's identity (see Potts and Weare 2018). However, according to the law in many sentencing systems, either discretionary or guidelines-based, SR should involve two separate and distinct parts of the judicial narrative: the crime's severity and the convicted person's individual factors and needs (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Campos-Pardillos 2022; Padfield 2013; Roberts and Gazal-Ayal 2013; Tata 2007). ‘In action’, there is significant variation in how the judges discuss and balance these elements. In some cases, both the crime and individual factors are discussed equally in the SR, while in other cases, the SR censure the crime at length but discusses only briefly the mitigating factors or minimise their value (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Potts and Weare 2018; see Tata 2007). These narrative-related qualities make SR an attractive ground for exploring the textual elements of punishment for the criminalised individuals.

In this paper, building on qualitative findings drawn from individuals who served long-term prison sentences in Israel, we explore how they perceive and negotiate textual elements of SR when constructing their self-narratives along the penal continuum from sentencing to release from prison. We will argue that criminalised individuals’ engagement with their SR includes three themes: communicative, transformative and physical textual dimensions. Together, the three themes demonstrate a complex process of individualisation of SR, the process by which criminalised individuals internalise the penal message from sentencing to release.

Literature review

Text, narrative and criminology

Narrative criminologists have recognised the power of narratives not merely to reflect, but also to influence, motivate and shape criminalised individuals’ reality. Such scholars point to ‘the types, textual composition and mechanics of stories that influence – either promote or curb – harm-doing’ (Presser and Sandberg 2019: 131). In recognising the power of narratives, narrative criminologists have coincided with scholars from a variety of disciplines, who during the final twentieth-century decades, shifted from interpreting narratives as only representing the narrator's story to perceiving narratives as ontological renditions that have independent integrity detached from the narrator's individual identity, that is, as objects of research on their own right (Somers and Gibson 1994; Josselson 2011; see Copes 2016; Maruna and Liem 2021). Maruna 2011; Narratives are usually seen by scholars as subjective, temporal representations of events that intermingled, reverberated, and merged in response to other encounters (Maruna and Liem 2021; Presser and Sandberg 2019). Scholars found that through their narratives, individuals can recount, reassess and re-construct their past actions, give meaning and situate themselves at the intersection of several stories, anticipate the future (Maruna and Liem 2021) and create symbolic and material boundaries separating them from the less desirable (Copes 2016).

Narrative criminologists have argued that the constitutive elements of criminalised people's narratives are a ‘causal factor’ in the ‘crime chain’. This narrative-making was found to apply to both the time before the crime (e.g., constructing their pre-crime ‘techniques of neutralisations’), as well as to post-crime processes (e.g., motivating their continuity or their desistance) (Fleetwood 2016; Maruna and Liem 2021; Presser and Sandberg 2019). The process of desistence from crime, these scholars have found, involves a ‘transformative aspect’ of criminalised individuals’ narratives, where would-be desisters find a future sense of self that is fundamentally different from their past identity. This transformation, in turn, creates a sense of redemption, hope and a feeling of retaking control over their lives (King 2013; Maruna 2001; Maruna and Liem 2021; Presser and Sandberg 2019). Through constructing new self-narratives, scholars have suggested, criminalised individuals may strive to reinterpret past events, interactions, actors, identities and capacities, and may re-frame their core self as inherently good, accountable, and active (Dewey et al.. 2018; King 2013; Maruna and Liem 2021; Wesely 2022).

Such narrative-making can serve the individual in prison life and after release. For example, narrative-making can assist incarcerated individuals survive the violent sphere of prison, find meaning, achieve a sense of internal security, and solve their institutional uncertainty during their imprisonment (Crewe 2013; Crewe et al.. 2017; Warr 2020). Likewise, narrative-making can help criminalised people manage their post-release ‘redemption script’ (Maruna 2001, 2011). Long-term incarcerated people, specifically, were found to respond to their particular set of burdens through a ‘narrative labour’ which enabled them to address their imposed carceral identity and its implications and to ultimately adopt an institutionally acceptable form of self (Warr 2020).

Scholars have also found that such narrative-making may involve a reaction to or engagement with ‘external’ accounts. Those accounts may be constructed by courtroom or other actors (e.g., judges, prosecutors, probation officers, prison therapists) that ‘co-author’ and re-construct individuals’ past, present or future narratives (Laws 2022; Maruna and Liem 2021; Quinn and Goodman 2022; Wesely 2022). The narratives take shape in a dynamic process ‘on an interactive basis embedded in particular context’ (Dollinger and Heppchen 2019: 317). The road to reentry, for example, was found to be ‘co-authored’ as part of the dialogue between the multiple organisations of the penal voluntary sector and the criminalised individuals (Quinn and Goodman 2022).

One form of narrative-making is creating counter-narratives. This allows the criminalised persons to resist an existing narrative attributed to them (e.g., a stigmatising group-related ‘master narrative’ as ‘criminals’) in a variety of ways (Sandberg and Andersen 2019). The making of narratives and counter-narratives may reflect the elasticity and duality of the individual narrative, and include distinguishing between the physical enactment and the socio-cultural meaning of this action to the individual's self and identity (Brookman 2015; Sandberg and Andersen 2019). Ugelvik (2019) has extended the concept of ‘external accounts’ and has demonstrated the deep connections between personal narratives and material objects. He argued that narratives and material objects may work together, each continuously and reciprocally informing the action and the understanding of a situation. Some material objects, especially when they are ‘narratively loaded’, may tell a story about the object's past, the owner's history, or have the ability to include a symbolic and ritualistic function (Ugelvik 2019).

Whilst the role of narratives for criminalised individuals has been explored from a variety of perspectives, narrative criminology has rarely explored the meaning of judicial texts for the construction of criminalised people's self-narratives. Nor has scholarship explored how these individuals respond, negotiate and perceive such texts during their ‘penal dialogue’ and their identity and meaning-making processes along the penal continuum. Specifically, scholars have argued that despite being ‘cultural texts replete with meaning’ (Sullivan 2017: 412) and ‘particularly important source[s] for analysis’ (Potts and Weare 2018: 25), the criminological potential of SRs has been largely under-explored (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Campos-Pardillos 2022; Padfield 2013).

Sentencing remarks and penal communication

SR typically provide legal closure to the trial. SR is provided as part of the judicial duty to give reasons and the judge ‘must state in open court, in ordinary language and in general terms, the court's reasons for deciding on the sentence’ (e.g., Sentencing Act 2020: s.52 (England and Wales)). In many legal systems, including Israel, the SR is not only delivered orally but also in writing and the parties receive a copy of the SR (Campos-Pardillos 2020; Sullivan 2017). Often, in cases of particular significance or public interest, they are published in official publications, the judiciary website, and the public media (unless privacy issues are raised) (e.g., Sentencing Council 2022). The written SR may be used for preparation for appeals or as precedent for future cases, but is primarily used to convey the judicial message to the sentenced individual, considered as their ‘first audience’ (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Chin-Charles v R (2019): par.6; Campos-Pardillos 2020).

At the simplest level, written SR, like any other document, are a material visible object, typically varying in length, from a few paragraphs to dozens of pages (see Ugelvik 2019). SR constitute a real or constructed ‘official version’ of the legal case (Bouhours and Daly 2007: 502) provided by the judicial ‘official storytellers’ (Potts and Weare 2018: 25). Typically, SR synthesises arguments, facts and considerations into one judicial narrative justifying the sentence. SR typically consist of a narrative of the crime and the harm caused; the criminalised individual's character; sentencing considerations and their balance; and the sentence imposed (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Campos-Pardillos 2022; Potts and Weare 2018).

Scholars have argued that SR also communicates value judgments and serves to express retributive values and emotions (e.g., fear, anger, empathy, distrust) as well as educative-rehabilitative, deterrent or public-safety-related messages (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Potts and Weare 2018). This communicative function of sentencing holds special importance for retributive-communicative theorists. Such theorists view the primary role of sentencing as conveying to the criminalised person, victim and society-at-large, past-looking moral censure reflecting the crime's severity (Duff 2001; von Hirsch 2017). The criminal trial, especially the sentencing phase, is viewed as a dialogical process. Such a process aims to engage the criminalised individual ‘as an active participant in the process who will receive and respond to the communication’ (Duff 2001: 97; Maslen 2015). The penal process aims to focus the criminalised persons’ attention on their crime, induce moral internalisation of their wrongdoing, and encourage them to undergo repentance, moral reform and reconciliation (Duff 2001).

However, the criminological literature has provided, so far, little support for how such communicative accounts can play an actual part in criminalised individuals’ construction of their self-narratives. Scholars have criticised the failure of sentencing courts (including some drug courts) to treat the criminalised individual as a good person who has done a bad deed, and instead communicate permanent messages of disrespect, stigmatisation and unforgiveness (Ahmed and Braithwaite 2005). Bouhours and Daly (2007: 514-515), exploring SR of youth criminalised for sex crimes, found that the sentencing communication was less of a dialogue and more of ‘a one-way solo performance’ that blended moral lecturing with threats, and ‘spoke to the young people, but rarely with them’ (emphasis originally). There is some evidence that oral sentencing communication in court does not effectively reach criminalised people: those people are often emotionally overwhelmed at sentencing, and soon after, during their first phase of imprisonment, take the approach of ‘getting your head down’ and neglect to consider the communicative meaning of their sentence (Schinkel 2014). However, this picture requires further inquiry, as criminologists increasingly argue that ‘moral work’ and its meaning for narrative-making does not end in court, especially for those serving long-term sentences (Ievins 2018; Warr 2020; see Sexton 2015; Van Ginneken and Hayes 2017). For example, scholars found that to adapt to their life imprisonment, lifers reproach themselves morally, reflect on their crime, and aim to turn to positive self-management as responsible agents (Crewe et al., 2017). Also, it was found that in constructing their self-narratives, individuals imprisoned for sex crimes ‘read’ their prison conditions as a sign of moral condemnation and experienced themselves as ‘criminals’ rather than as merely ‘prisoners’ (Ievins 2018).

Whilst these studies are valuable for understanding the possibility of communication in penal reality and its limitations, they largely leave open the textual meaning of SR in such communications along the penal continuum. Currently, we lack a full theoretical and empirical understanding of the relationship between criminalised individuals and their SR, including how, when, and in which ways they engage with their SR and what this text means for the construction of their narratives and identity-making in the penal dialogue.

Context and method

Context

The Israeli criminal law system is based on English law, but relies exclusively on bench trials. All criminal trial decisions, from fact-finding and deciding guilt to sentencing determinations, are made by a professional judge (in serious cases, a three-judge panel). Since 2012, Israel has structured, to some degree, its sentencing decision-making. Whilst proportionality is the predominant sentencing principle by law, judges should consider the criminalised individual's personal factors both for calibrating the sentencing within a proportionate sentencing range and for deviating from this range for rehabilitation (Roberts and Gazal-Ayal 2013). The Israeli Supreme Court stressed the individualised nature of sentencing that ‘requires considering the actor and the act’ (State v Doe [2021]: 9). The Israel Penal Law 1977 determined in 2012 (amendment no. 113) that there is a ‘duty of [the] court to explain its sentence’ and that the court ‘must state and detail its reasons for its determination’ (s.40n). Judicial decisions in Israel usually are written down and published publicly (except in cases of confidentiality) (see Roberts and Gazal-Ayal 2013). At the sentencing phase, the judge should ‘read the sentence in public’, usually in the presence of the persons convicted and their counsel, the prosecutor, the crime victims and possibly other audiences (e.g., the parties’ families, probation officer, media) (Criminal Procedure Law 1982: s.193). Typically, the convicted person is given a copy of the SR at the end of the oral sentencing hearing in court.

Sample and procedure

In this study, which is the main part of a larger project on incarcerated people's legal experiences, twenty ex-incarcerated people were interviewed in the first half of 2022 about their experiences related to their SR during the criminal process (e.g., their experiences in court, prison and after release). The interviewees, all released on licence by the parole board after imprisonment, were recruited by the Israeli prison rehabilitation authority (PRA), the official authority for rehabilitating prisoners and making post-release recommendations to the parole board (Prison Rehabilitation Authority 2022). We used purposeful sampling, a widely used qualitative method, for identifying and selecting individuals that are especially knowledgeable and able to communicate their narratives in an expressive and reflective manner (Palinkas et al., 2015).

We focused on individuals serving long-term prison terms to achieve meaningful narratives regarding their experiences with SR along the penal continuum. For such individuals, the SR holds a dramatic impact on their lives, is typically more elaborated (to justify the heavy sentence) and is loaded with emotional language, and is thus expected to elicit reactions (Bouhours and Daly 2007). In addition, long prison terms are typically imposed for serious offences that are expected to be associated with moral guilt. Furthermore, long-term incarcerated people can provide rich narratives that reflect their need to negotiate their significant carceral identity-work and pains (Warr 2020). The selection criteria, considering the study's aims were the following: individuals that were recently released from prison (less than one year from release) and thus relatively close to prison experience and sentenced to substantial prison time (more than 4 years). We applied, with the technical assistance of the PRA, to all the individuals who met these criteria (60). The prospective interviewees received general written information about the study and its aims from the researchers. Thirty-five did not respond and five refused for personal reasons (e.g., being busy). Finally, 20 individuals agreed to participate in the study and they make up the study's sample, a sample size that is consistent with similar studies (e.g., Schinkel 2014; Van Ginneken and Hayes 2017).

The interviewees’ characteristics were relatively heterogenous in terms of offence, age, ethnicity and criminal history and therefore allowed diverse narrative variations (Palinkas et al., 2015). The interviewees were all men, their age range was 23–62 (average: 39 years), and their ethnicity was one Druze, eight Jews and eleven Muslims, rates that largely correspond with the general population in Israeli prisons for lengthy prison sentences (IPS 2022). They were sentenced to an average sentence of about 10.5 years, for a variety of offences, including violent offences (10), fraud, bribery and theft (4), selling firearms (3) or drugs (2) and sex crime (1). For seven, it was their first criminal conviction. They served their sentences in medium or high-security prisons and were all paroled under PRA's post-release plan.

Each interview, which lasted 90 min on average, was conducted by both researchers, and took place, according to the interviewees’ preferences, in different locations (the interviewees’ homes/work). All the interviewees spoke fluent Hebrew. The interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim, and later translated into English by a bilingual translator. Field notes were written during the interviews mainly for documenting non-verbal responses during the interview (e.g., crying). A semi-structured interview guide was used to conduct each interview, which focused on three main subjects. These subjects revolved around the experience of hearing and reading the SR during sentencing, in prison and after release (e.g., Do you remember your SR now? How did you feel when you read your SR? When and where did you read them? What did you do with them?). The researchers followed the interviewees’ lead and interrupted as little as possible to allow the interviewees to tell their narratives as they saw fit. Inductive-oriented thematic qualitative analysis was conducted by the researchers – each separately – to gather all the codes that were relevant to the potential themes. This was done with a focus on the interviewees’ experiences of their SR from sentencing to release. These themes were reviewed and discussed between the researchers until agreement was achieved, and then finally defined and reported (Braun and Clarke 2006). The researchers were debriefed by two scholars familiar with the field to increase credibility. This process included discussions of the analysis and suggestion of rival interpretations of the data (Creswell and Miller 2000). Ethical approval for the research was given by the University's institutional review board as well as by the PRA research committee. Informed written consent was obtained from the interviewees before starting the interview. Strict confidentiality and anonymity were assured to the interviewees, and pseudonyms were used in reporting the findings.

Findings

Sentencing remarks as a communicative text

When asked about their general perception of their SR, the interviewees viewed their SR as important texts. All the interviewees, except one, had read their SR at some point in the criminal process. When describing their crime, the majority of the interviewees often did so with a reference to the language contained in their SR, and some of them even remembered exact quotations from them. This was contrasted with the interviewees’ minimal reflection on their written verdict (that was given separately at their guilt determination) which was viewed as a legalised text, belonging to their attorney and detached from their narrative.

When delving into the meaning of the SR for their narratives, the interviewees described their SR as having a communicative dimension between them and the judge. The interviewees described their textual journey with their SR as starting at the sentencing hearing in court when they first hear these remarks in vivo publicly. However, during their sentencing hearing itself, most were closed and resistant to the judicial message. Thus, they read, at best, only the bottom line of the SR that consists of the duration of their sentence: ‘I remembered only the number of three years’ (Mohamad). They offered two interrelated narratives for how they responded to the SR at the sentencing hearing.

In one narrative, they felt shocked and emotionally overwhelmed when hearing their punishment, ‘[Y]ou know, it's like a shock… I cannot look at the remarks’ (Mohamad) and ‘I first cried, automatically, I started thinking about the young children, the wife, and how they would be without a father, and [I] would leave them for many years, it killed me’ (Walid). The sentencing hearing was viewed as a singular moment in time. Until that moment they were still hopeful for a better end (for some, based on their counsel's promises). After that moment their reality changes as does their status from one of an active agent that potentially can change his legal future to a passive, weak, powerless and hopeless object: ‘when I received the sentence, I felt like a small child that looks for his mom, the weakest in the world, and I understand that I am the weak’ (Ahmed) and ‘the moment you receive the sentence and know that you’re going, like, for nine years in prison… I really felt helpless, that I am just a number in this society, you understand?’ (Amar).

In a related narrative, the interviewees resisted listening to their SR in court due to their disappointment in seeing that the judge had reduced their whole life story to their crime: ‘The judge, he did not pay so much interest to who you are and what you are’ (Gad) and ‘the judge was not interested in my feelings, what I feel or why I did it’ (Moses). Upon this ground, the judicial communication was experienced as a de-humanising, stigmatising interaction that set symbolic boundaries between them and society:

‘At the end of the day, I break the law, I’m a criminal, but [the judge] described me, made me, a monster… [he wrote] you are violent, dangerous to the public, but I did not attack because I liked it, I had reasons. I wanted him to put inside his remarks the circumstances, what made me do so, and that I am remorseful… but he did not’ (Omar).

Several interviewees interpret the de-individualising experience at the sentencing hearing as humiliating and as closing their attentiveness and their ability to assimilate its message into their own narrative: ‘From the judge's humiliations I do not get any message, nothing goes through humiliation… If you address a person, it does not matter what he is, who he is, what he did, you should address him with respect’ (Ahmed). One interviewee, subject to exceptionally long and censuring SRs, explained that he was unwilling to read his SR as he felt the judge paid him no interest; he viewed his sentence as a divine rather than a human decision:

‘Did you feel that the judge was listening to you at sentencing?’

‘[bitterly laughing]… I did not read it… I am a believing person and I know that the Holy One, blessed be He, is not wrong… I deserve what I got, I did these things, you made a mistake, you'll pay’ (Roni).

Some of these interviewees, did not even expect the judges – viewed as offence-focused bureaucrats – to consider their individuality in their SR: ‘It is not his job to pay any attention to me… he has many defendants every day, he cannot relate to everyone. His work is to judge the offence’ (Gad). These interviewees viewed their SR as a proxy for the criminal justice system's over-generalising and de-individualising attitude: ‘The system works schematically. Criminals of this type, we give them this type of punishment’ (David).

There was a marked contrast among the several interviewees who perceived that the judge meaningfully referred to their whole individual story in their SR (and their sentencing hearing). In such cases, they were more open to listening to the judicial message regarding their crime. For example, the actual SR of Nasser, convicted for taking a bribe as a police officer, read as follows: ‘We cannot exaggerate the seriousness of bribery, a crime that undermines the integrity of the state and symbolises systemic corruption… the perpetrators of bribery must be treated harshly … for conveying a clear message to maintain moral purity’. The court also gave considerable weight to Nasser's ‘confession, genuine remorse, and the medical deterioration [that underlied his crime]’. Nasser, when interviewed, described how he internalised the judicial message as part of his self-narrative, feeling the SR focused on his personality: ‘In the remarks, he did not just analyse the offence, [but he] analysed my character, how I got into trouble, and that I can learn from it’. Nasser also heard the judicial censure towards his crime: ‘[T]he judge… referred to my actions and how they harmed democracy and undermined society… it makes me feel that these are my actions that I did’. Yosef, convicted of domestic violence, described a similar process of internalisation following individualisation:

‘[The judge] was eager to get into [the facts], to be just… I remember to this day, he said: “what was the catalyst for this event”… He gave me the impression that he was really interested in me, [in] every story, yes, he cared… [I know] the crime that was described in my remarks, that I hurt my wife's daughter and all these things, it's a great shame… I learned my lesson’.

For other interviewees, their meaningful engagement with their SR became possible only later, through the mediation of correctional officials in prison (e.g., social workers, criminologists). Such correctional officials, they explained, read the SR to get to know the prisoners and their background, and in order to discuss the contents of those SR with them during therapeutic prison sessions. These interviewees were open to hearing the judicial message as mediated in this way:

‘The judge did not look at me, he did not pay any interest… He only thought about deterring others… [but] when you start therapy with a [prison] social worker and you begin to touch on things and understand where the crime came from, and why you committed the crime… you begin to know yourself’ (Sami).

These interviewees viewed the role of such correctional officials as complementary and explanatory to the judicial message, because such officials were focused on their whole life story (e.g., motivations, social background).

To sum up this theme, the SR holds a communicative meaning. However, when the sentencing hearing is perceived as humiliating, crime-focused, and objectifying, criminalised people are largely resistant to hearing the judicial message. Only when the SR is perceived as clearly reflecting their individuality are they open to hearing the judicial message. For some, the SR text can help provide such individualisation at a later stage by correctional officials.

Sentencing remarks as a transformative text

Several interviewees’ experiences with their SR went beyond the question of listening to the abstract and informative judicial message delivered to them. When the interviewees were asked if they ever read their SR, these interviewees described that the need to read their SR arose only after entering prison, often during the first days in prison: ‘when I was given the paper, I did not look at it until I got to prison’ (Mohamad). After entering prison, they described how their SR transformed them, allowing them to find meaning and construct their identity both in prison and after release. There were two interconnected narratives in which these interviewees related to their SR in prison for self-transformation.

First, they turned to their SR in an attempt to adapt to their existential crisis of becoming a long-term prisoner. Their SR, they described, helped them find moral-psychological meaning for their prison suffering and connect it to their sense of blame and ‘paying back’: ‘[O]nce you understand that you are paying for what you did, it's much easier to live with it… I was wrong, I hurt society, and I wanted to pay for what I did’ (Rami). Several interviewees explained that they repeatedly read their SR in their prison cells, attempting to overcome their self-denial: ‘I read it for two years or so almost every day in prison’ (Gad). Such repetitive reading of their SR was viewed as maintaining an omnipresent and inescapable external reminder of their guilt:

‘[In prison] I read it all the time… Like sometimes, I say to myself, “why was I incarcerated here when I did not do anything”, but I go back to it, and yes, I really… I really did it’ (Rami).

Such re-reading of their SR in order to find existential meaning involved their deep emotions. During such re-reading processes, they experienced a flood of intense emotional pain that was associated with their prison suffering: ‘I felt that I want to read it, at night, when I felt bored, and there is nothing else to do inside… when I read it I felt tears, only tears, for all the mess and the humiliation’ (Abraham).

Second, the (re)reading of their SR in prison provided them with a depersonalised perspective on the causes of their crime and evidenced their authentic need for others’ help at the time of the crime: ‘[After reading my SR], today I understand from here, what was the motivation of my crime’ (Ahmed). One interviewee, for example, described how, when reading his SR, he recalls that his violent crime was motivated also by mental difficulties:

‘I repeat every word [of the SR] because I want to know how I was in the past, what I did wrong, what was my mistake… in those years my behavior and everyday life were very different, I had several events that I prefer not to return to them, my brother had an accident and we fell and I fell to a mental condition’ (Yaacov).

In reading SR in prison, they used these SR as containing an ‘objective’ and more neutral-distant perspective, referring to themselves as almost another person: ‘When I read [the remarks]… I began to understand that I was a lost person then… he deserves punishment, but he also deserves some kind of help’ (Hasan).

For these interviewees the SR also allowed them to re-experience and revise their self-narrative. They were able to re-imagine their ‘story’ anew, searching for an alternative narrative. One interviewee described his experience of re-reading his SR in prison:

‘At [court], I did not admit it, even to myself. I thought I did not make any mistakes… but there [in prison] I learned about myself… I realized that I had made a big mistake… I could have prevented this crime, I participated in it… [Now] if I fell into a situation where I’m fighting with people, I would understand that I had a part in it. I want to improve myself… I’m not the way I was, blaming the world and thinking I was fine. No, I cannot repair anyone, I can just repair myself’ (Abraham).

Such a complex process allowed these interviewees to achieve a sense of ‘returning in time’ and re-imagining a different and more positive future, and a sense of distinguishing between their past, present and future ‘self’. The reading of the SR allowed them to break the expected linear criminal progression, enabled them to reclaim their agency, and freed them to act differently in a future desistance-oriented reality.

To sum up, in this theme another layer of the sentencing is reflected beyond the abstract condemning message it conveyed. The SR text enables the interviewees to read it repeatedly and draw a connecting line between their crime, as described in the SR, and their penal suffering. Additionally, the ontological existence of their SR allows them to detach themselves from their crime and examine themselves more extrinsically, thus allowing for introspection and transformation.

Sentencing remarks as a textual object

The interviewees’ engagement with their SR is also related to the SR's physical-material traits, which are distinct from their communicative or transformative textual dimensions. The interviewees described their SR on a physical level: paper(s), typed, signed by a judge, and carrying the official state logo. The construction of their SR as an object, served therapeutic and ritualistic purposes for the interviewees in different narratives.

Several interviewees described their SR as an unusual object. They felt a need to preserve their SR in their prison cells or at home after release, even though they did not plan to read them again: ‘They are with me, I preserve them in my room [at my house]’ (Moses). The mere physical presence of their SR served as a physical reminder – a warning sign – symbolising what they are capable of: ‘this paper will stay with me all my life… that's what's holding me’ (Nader) and ‘this page that I walked into [prison] with is the one that wakes me up’ (Ahmed) and its presence ‘makes me awake all the time, [encourages] me to be a different man’ (Rami).

For several interviewees, the physical presence of their SR in their lives was negative, as reflecting an ongoing reality of their crime and punishment in their narratives. They associated the object of their SR with negative feelings of embarrassment and distress and as a painful reminder of their past, one that they wished to forget. As such, some interviewees showed resistance to bringing the SR into their homes, as this object ‘can bring me back, something that I paid for, and [I want to] move on’ (Haim) and ‘I do not want to be cooked in it, and made bitter’ (Yaacov).

Similarly, perceiving the SR as a problematic textual object, several interviewees described a need to actively engage with it in order to make sense of their reality and mitigate their inner tension. One interviewee described that he wrote passages from the Quran on the other side of his SR, keeping them in his cell throughout his imprisonment, and after release, preserved it as a sacred object that he ‘looks after’ (Mohamad). Others engaged with their SR through more radical acts, and sought to physically eliminate their presence. Several interviewees described that they burned their SR, as a step in the process of starting a fresh life after release from prison. Such destruction was experienced as painful and symbolised for them their desire to leave their past behind: ‘I did not want this reminder, no, no, no… when I burned it I felt in pain… I felt that I left it in the past, I put it behind me’ (Hasan) and ‘when I was released, I tore everything and threw it in the bin… I felt like I removed a shell from myself… this is my past and it died, and, like, I’m looking ahead’ (Yosef). The process of destroying their SR was described as a form of cathartic ritual that created a sense of purification from the haunted ‘mystical’ presence that reflected their past self-identity:

‘When I came back from prison, I burned all the papers [the remarks]… I did not want to be with this heavy thing, it affected me. I cannot think about it, I do not want it to enter my house. It [the remarks] stayed with me after I was paroled, and when I came back I burned it… when I burned it I felt all sorts of negative feelings, like how did I get into this, how did I end up in prison, convicted? After I burned it, I was silent, alone, I thought inner thoughts, for forgetting this thing, even though it was hard to forget this wound’ (Ahmed).

Another interviewee described that when released from prison, after destroying his SR, he immediately felt a need to get a tattoo as a sign of a new beginning:

‘When I left prison, I threw it [the remarks] into the bin… I wanted to start anew, it was a kind of ceremony… I thought that I wanted to start a new life. I do not want to constantly see things that remind me of crimes, the problems. I tattooed a symbol of a new beginning on my neck’ (Gad).

In such cases, the ritualistic act performed on the subject of the SR reflects a more complex experience. They intended to distance themselves from their painful past, but at the same time implicitly internalising their past as a part of their physical body.

To sum up, in this theme SR was perceived beyond its textual-communicative and transformative layers as an object that was unique to the criminalised individuals’ narratives. This theme reflects two object-related meanings of the text of SR: First, the SR is perceived as a symbolic object that represents the possibility of falling into crime and has a desisting-warning quality. Second, SR are s a ‘living’ object that influences reality, and can be ritualised for the repairing and purifying of one's identity both in prison and after release.

Discussion

The findings expand the boundaries of narrative criminology by exploring the role of judicial texts in the co-production of criminalised individuals’ self-narratives with more ‘external’ narratives, during sentencing, imprisonment and release from prison. Such engagement, we found, holds communicative, transformative and physical textual dimensions.

The first theme depicts the SR as a textual vehicle for delivering the judicial message and shows how criminalised people respond and react to their SR. We found they are largely unwilling to meaningfully listen to the in-court sentencing communication, as indicated by previous findings of failed court communication (Schinkel 2014). However, our findings complicate and expand this picture by emphasising the textual role of SR in the ‘penal dialogue’ (Duff 2001; Maslen 2015). We found that criminalised individuals when hearing their SR at court are shocked and emotionally overwhelmed, humiliated and helpless. Their feelings reflect that SR is ‘the narrative that defines the boundary’ (Copes, 2016: 209). In other words, SR function for these individuals as an official demarcation between them and law-abiding society, stigmatising them as ‘others’ and morally different, reducing them to their crime. One interviewee, however, showed a resistant narrative in the face of an exceptionally lengthy and censuring SR. This interviewee performed ‘elastic’ narrative-making by sophistically acknowledging his moral wrong but declining to acknowledge the human-judicial authority to censure him (Brookman 2015; Sandberg and Andersen 2019).

This boundary-making had several exceptions that reflect the varied and discretionary nature of the crafting of SR ‘in action’ (see Potts and Weare 2018; Tata 2007). The findings show communication takes place through SR where a court individualises the person convicted of a crime by relating to broader life contexts beyond that person's crime (e.g., motivations, needs), speaking with them as individuals (Ahmed and Braithwaite 2005; Bouhours and Daly 2007; Schinkel 2014). Those interviewees who perceived that the judge addressed them as individuals and distinguished between their crime and their personhood, had less intense feelings of shock and humiliation and were more open to hearing the judicial message. This finding is integrated with responsive conceptions of censure that suggest taking seriously the criminalised individual's side in the penal dialogue (Duff 2001; Maslen 2015). It also supports re-integrative-shaming theorists’ call for considering the person's whole story accurately at sentencing (Ahmed and Braithwaite 2005) and the psychological association between humiliation and emotional avoidance (Elshout et al., 2017).

We also found that even in cases where the judicial message is rejected at the sentencing phase, individualised SR allow the person convicted to listen to this judicial message in retrospect. Some of the interviewees re-engaged with this text during their imprisonment by re-reading this text in their prison cells after the judicial process was closed. This exposes how post-sentencing correctional work can expand, complete and mediate penal communication after sentencing (Crewe et al., 2017; Ievins 2018; Schinkel 2014).

The second theme encourages the narrative criminologist to focus more firmly on the complex and dynamic fusion between different narratives when exploring the narrative-making of criminalised people (Quinn and Goodman 2022). This theme shows the transformative quality of SR, which goes beyond the criminalised individual's reaction to the judicial message delivered through the SR. The unique textual characteristics of the SR enable transformative performance; these characteristics include SR as an ‘external’ text, written by a formal judicial authority, and which can focus on the individual, their crime and personal factors (Bouhours and Daly 2007; Campos-Pardillos 2022). The findings suggest two elements that comprise such transformative performance through SR.

The first element is that of a ‘meaning-maker’: SR allows criminalised individuals to adapt to the existential crisis of becoming long-term prisoners and give meaning to their penal suffering (Crewe et al., 2017; Maruna 2001). This supports the argument that moral work does not end in court and highlights the function of SR vis a vis such work (Ievins 2018; Schinkel 2014). This finding also integrates with previous findings that enlighten long-term prisoners’ particular need to address their imposed carceral identity and their pre-established sense of self (Warr 2020). In this context, SR can be seen as a form of a textual ‘boundary object’ when entering prison, which allows them to make their moral wrongdoing more evident, and thus, to connect their present penal suffering to their past crime (Maruna 2001). The re-reading of their SR may involve a deep moral-emotional work that recalls a purifying self-imposed penance and identity change (Duff 2001). Such narrative-making might be also viewed as part of the need of incarcerated individuals to construct a ‘flagellant self’ for managing their carceral future when engaging with prison officials, and when released with the parole board and rehabilitation authorities in the community (Warr 2020: 36).

The second element is that of an ‘external reference point’: SR constitutes a textual-temporal ‘external’ reference point that allows criminalised people to examine and compare their therapeutic needs at the time of the crime with their present needs at the time of incarceration and post-incarceration. The SR was thus used by criminalised people to guide and transform their identity and agency by ‘co-authoring’ their narrative with their SR (albeit on unequal terms) (see Quinn and Goodman 2022). That transformation provides them with a sense of spatial-temporal ‘returning in time’ to their past, to re-order, and edit their narrative anew (Maruna and Liem 2021). Such work also allows them to reimagine a different and more positive future and to distinguish between their past and present selves. This was made possible by imagining a dynamic alternative reality that challenges the past-looking temporal narrative of the retributive theorists (von Hirsch 2017; c.f. Duff 2001; Maslen 2015). SR allow such individuals to ‘re-biograph’ their painful past to construct their self as active moral agents capable of future desistance (Maruna 2001: 87). They are able to imagine themselves breaking the expected linear-temporal causality, experience an alternative sense of the future, and distinguish between their ‘here and now’ and ‘there and then’ past identities (Crewe et al., 2017; Maruna 2001).

The transformative dimension of SR is integrated with scholarship that proposes the therapeutic benefits of its ‘expressive reading’ (Laws 2022). Such reading allows the individual to construct an alternative view of reality, one that makes sense of negative events, allows the release of emotional tension, and promotes behavioural change (Laws 2022). The way that SR enables the criminalised persons to make meaning and to demarcate their past and evolving present self, integrates also with theories of text and interpretation that emphasise the fluid, reciprocal and evolving process of the ‘hermeneutical circle’ between the text and the interpreter's identity (Somers and Gibson 1994).

The third theme supports the extension of narrative criminology not only to the verbal and written texts but also to the casting of the textual narratives in material form (see Ugelvik 2019). This theme shows how criminalised individuals experience SR as physical objects, as connected to but also departing from the meaning they are supposed to carry (Ugelvik 2019). They act upon this physical object in an attempt to negotiate their present reality and their self-narrative, describing a continuum of responses to this object. Some of the criminalised individuals preserved this textual object in their prison cells and after release, as a kind of ‘amulet’ that sets boundaries between their past ‘criminal’ and present ‘desistance-oriented’ identities, making this object part of their lives. Others developed deep relations with this textual object, trying to connect it to their personal narrative (e.g., wrote Quran passages on it). This latter group constructs the SR in a liminal position between a ‘secular’-judicial-distant object and a ‘sacred’-personal-present object, negotiating its meaning (see Ugelvik 2019).

Some individuals, however, dissociate themselves from their SR. They view them as an ‘impure object’ that does not belong to their personal place after prison and that raises embarrassment and unease (Douglas 2003). This finding is integrated with the notion that narratively loaded objects may be imbued with ‘a special essence or spirit’ (Ugelvik 2019: 227–228). That ‘spiritual’ quality becomes even more evident when the object says something about the individual, as do the SR, both clearly and powerfully. Some individuals, upon release, perform a ritual-like emotional act of destruction through burning. These rituals are anxiety-laden acts of ‘throwing away’ and carry a sense of ‘getting rid of things’ (Gregson et al., 2007). With them, they seek a sense of closure as part of the ‘rite of passage’ of re-entry when constructing their new desisting ‘self’ (Maruna 2001, 2011). Such acts hold for them emotional, ritualistic and reparative functions not easily expressed through words alone that recall the identity-work involved in art-material therapy. For others, the destruction of their SR was converted into their physical body as a tattoo, a sign of an identity change, blurring the boundaries between their ‘self’ and the ‘external’ textual object, when constructing their post-prison self.

The three themes, taken together, reflect criminalised people's attempts to individualise their SR when engaging with this text. In the first theme, they aim to individualise the sentencing communication by engaging with their SR only where they assess the judicial ‘story’ as reflecting accurately their subjective past before entering prison. In the second theme, they seek to individualise their SR, mainly for making meaning of their present prison adaptation. In the third theme, they intend to reconstruct their future desistance through ritualising their SR during re-entry from prison to the community. Overall, the engagement of criminalised individuals with their SR reflects the various distances created between themselves and their SR and various conceptual qualities they derive from this text. We can metaphorise such a process as a ‘condensation’ of the textual qualities of SR for such individuals: The SR change from an intangible abstract message in the sentencing court, through being perceived as a meaning-maker during imprisonment, to being viewed as a ritualistic object when returning from prison to the community, an object even internalised into their body.

The findings should be read with several limitations in mind. First, the sample is based on ex-prison on parole, all men, from one jurisdiction, and explores one type of judicial text. It is possible that different narratives exist for different personal (e.g., gender, ethnicity), correctional, or legal factors that might raise different narratives.

Whilst we should be cautious in expressing generalisations, this study sheds light on the under-researched complex intersection between criminalised individuals and how they use their SR to create a narrative that allows them to understand themselves, their crime and to adapt to imprisonment and achieve future desistance. The findings encourage avenues for future research for narrative criminology by focusing on the interactions between criminalised individuals and the texts produced within the criminal process. We suggest expanding further research to explore the textual experience of SR in different legal regimes (e.g., numeric-guidelines sentencing regime or based on oral remarks), individuals (e.g., sentencing of youth, white-collar or political-related crimes) and sentences (e.g., lengthy community sanctions) as well as exploring the possible gap between the what the SR are supposed to address and what message they give ‘in action’ to criminalised individuals’. This future research should also be expanded to other textual-legal contexts (e.g., pre-sentence reports or parole decisions) and other actors that may ‘co-author’ these texts with criminalised individuals (e.g., prosecutors, prison officials, social workers) when constructing their narratives and identities.