ORCID

Abstract

Since 2013 I have worked as a volunteer on consecutive externally funded research projects at a resettlement scheme (RS) that works with men released on temporary licence from the local prison and others on community orders referred through probation. To date I have 80+ interview transcripts from 33 men and two women, mostly due to the co-production of blog posts for the Photographic-electronic Narrative (PeN) project. The focus of this article is a case study about Matthew, who engaged in a series of interviews with me for the PeN Project at the end of 2016, when he was referred to RS through probation. He was and still is enduring the pains of supervision from probation and has spent short spells in prison. His ‘master status’ from Goffman (1963), is that of a criminalised individual known by the police in the local area. In this case study I use some photographs he took whilst at the RS, alongside quotes from his interview transcripts. They demonstrate how he is keen to break free from a criminalised past but struggles to reconcile experiences of abandonment from his mother and abuses from within the ‘care system’.

Publication Date

2019-07-18

Publication Title

Auto/Biography Review 2018

First Page

111

Last Page

128

Embargo Period

2020-01-23

Organisational Unit

School of Society and Culture

Keywords

Auto/Biography, Sociology, narratives

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