ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the institutional, social, and psychological motivations for telling a story of personal change, offering a narratively oriented analysis that casts the reform story in a more critical light than it has been cast. Steinberg describes stories in South Africa's prisons as 'weapons, tools, the stuff of action', and as such they can be seen as a meaningful coping strategy that helps offenders find 'reason and purpose in the bleakest of life histories'. It is precisely for this reason that the stories of change told by inmates in South Africa's prisons must not be taken at face value: this narrative is employed because it provides prisoners with a coping mechanism and a measure of agency during imprisonment. The stories are often, it seems, responses to the deprivations of prison life and, even more, the results of the perceived insurmountability of the structural violence that characterises life for much of South Africa's prison population.
