Punishment as text

By Netanel Dagan and Adiel Zimran

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 ll this gap, based on qualitative ndings from formerly incarcerated people in Israel, this paper aimed to theorise their engage- ment with their sentencing remarks (SR). We found that they experienced their SR as text that held communicative, transformative and physical dimensions. The ndings 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 ndings contribute to an understanding of the connection between judicial work and incarcerated people s desistance and identity-making pro- cesses through the textual bridge of SR.