Playing games to re-story troubled family narratives in Danish maximum-security prisons
| Date | 01 October 2020 |
| Author | Thomas Markussen,Eva Knutz |
| DOI | 10.1177/1462474520915748 |
| Published date | 01 October 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Playing games to re-story
troubled family
narratives in Danish
maximum-security
prisons
Thomas Markussen
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Eva Knutz
University of Southern Denmark, Denmark
Abstract
Narrative criminology has successfully demonstrated how the construction and struc-
ture of self-narratives are important for prisoners’ process of change and desistance
from crime. However, much of this work has tended to focus narrowly on the offender
and how he or she uses self-narrative to relate to the offense, the victim, past child-
hood, the family, or projected hopes for future change. In an effort to extend prior
work, this study takes a complementary approach by analyzing how children and their
long-term incarcerated fathers in Danish maximum-security prisons talk about family
relations and cohesiveness during imprisonment. To address the gap in research and
methodology, we introduce the notion of family narratives, and through microanalyses
of in-depth interviews with seven prisoners and seven children, we extract three kinds
of family narratives. These narratives were prompted by using a board game recently
implemented into the visiting program in Danish prisons to help children and prisoners
to re-construct disrupted family relations. Our findings illuminate how the design of a
game can be a novel method for collecting data on children and incarcerated fathers
and how family narratives can serve as lenses for studying fragile family identity, mas-
culinity, and child–parent relations.
Corresponding author:
Thomas Markussen, Department of Design & Communication, University of Southern Denmark,
Universitetsparken 1, DK-6000 Kolding, Denmark.
Email: thma@sdu.dk
Punishment & Society
2020, Vol. 22(4) 483–508
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1462474520915748
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
Keywords
family relationships, identity work, narrative criminology, Nordic exceptionalism,
positioning, prison visitation
Introduction
“My dad once drew something on me, and then I drew something on him. He drew
an anchor on me ...One of his friends is called Swing. So, I wrote Swing and then
a heart around it [laughing].” This is 11-year-old Oskar, describing how he tat-
tooed his father John’s forearm using a black permanent marker while playing a
new board game that has been implemented into the visiting program in Danish
maximum-security prisons.
1
John is serving a life sentence for murder and is the
leader of a biker gang, where Swing is also a member. Oskar deliberately drew the
tattoo on John’s forearm to tease his father, as he was sure it would stay visible to
the other prisoners on John’s wing after his visit.
Through Oskar’s account, we learn not only how a game can elicit the drawing
of symbols—hearts and anchors—that he and his father used to perform divergent
expressions of masculinity. More importantly, in the interview data presented in
this paper, we are given an opportunity to study how family narratives are coau-
thored by incarcerated fathers and their children to build and maintain relations in
troubled times. For John and Oskar, for instance, co-constructing the “Fun
Family” narrative is pivotal because—as both stated in their interviews—humor,
jokes, and teasing are used to cope with the seriousness of the situation.
Previous work, especially within narrative criminology, has successfully dem-
onstrated how the construction and structure of self-narratives matter for prison-
ers’ process of change and desistance from crime (Maruna, 2001). Moreover,
prisoners’ self-narratives are often conceived as valuable analytical lenses to
study how they position themselves as subjects, for instance, by maneuvering
between divergent roles of hypermasculinity and softer versions of masculinity
(see e.g. Dollinger, 2017; Kolind et al., 2017; McKendy, 2006; Presser and
Sandberg, 2015; Søgaard et al., 2016). However, with a few exceptions, much of
this work has tended to focus only on the prisoner and how he use self-narrative to
relate to the offense, the victim, past childhood, the family, or projected hopes for
future change. Rarely have prisoners’ self-narratives been considered together with
those of their children to study how the two coauthor family narratives, although
the importance of incorporating prisoners’ children into research on imprisonment
and family relationships has been well-recognized by criminologists. However, so
are the methodological challenges related to collecting empirical data on this vul-
nerable group (Turney et al., 2017: 201).
Addressing this gap and methodological challenge, in this article we draw out
empirical findings from a three-year participatory design research study, where
incarcerated fathers and prisoners’ children (age 11–18) were involved in designing
484 Punishment & Society 22(4)
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