ABSTRACT
Against the universalist avowals of the law, its target communities produce diverse cultural forms asserting their own specific knowledges and experiences of how law works. These narratives and representations provide explanatory frameworks, critical contexts and alternative understandings of peoples’ everyday ‘troubles with the law’. In doing so they also insistently repose seemingly open and shut questions of the law, of the relationship between crime and punishment, and between criminality, society and prison.
