ABSTRACT
There are many accounts of their lives given by criminals. These may be in the form of autobiographies or posts on the Internet. There are also details widely available of responses criminals have made in police interviews, or actual confessions. The proposed project therefore focuses on case studies of these personal accounts. It proposes that the justifications for criminality, especially violence, draw on some central narratives in a culture. These may be revenge, the need to keep ‘face’, to protect a greater good, or even an accident of circumstances. Intriguingly, these are the sorts of reasons that politicians give for going to war. Perhaps this is not surprising because they draw on the same culturally embedded narratives that criminals have available.
