Speaking of Crime: `I don't Know what Made Me do it'

Abstract

This paper analyzes the autobiographical narratives of criminal acts as told by inmates in a US maximum security prison. It suggests (1) that narrations about crime involve structures that show a speaker's words can place him in a continuum of personal agency in regards to his own actions; (2) that a prisoner's personal agency shifts in relation to modes of telling throughout his discourse; and (3) that a person's autobiographical speech positions him in a multilayered participation framework (Schiffrin, 1987, 1994) that is conducive to rehabilitative thinking. Thus, in telling his story the criminal positions himself in the participation framework with an interlocutor, but also simultaneously within the framework of establishing a personal being (Harré, 1984) in the chronology of his own life and the synchrony of his current living situation in prison. Using an interactional sociolinguistic approach, I focus this paper on epistemic utterances such as, `I don't know what made me do it'; `I don't know whether I thought “shoot him”, or not'; and `I don't know whether instincts had me shoot him'. I examine the reflexive and reflective nature of these utterances as they break the telling frame, showing both evaluation and speculation on the criminal act, the actor and on personal agency.

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