Contents
 Foreword by Bruce A. Arrigo
 Acknowledgements
 1. Self and Story
 2. Offender Identities, Offender Narratives
 3. Thinking about Research Effects
 4. Research Methods When Research Is Being Researched
 5. Reform Narratives: Return of the Good Self
 6. Stability Narratives: Never a Bad Self
 7. Elastic Narratives: Creative Integration
 8. Tales of Heroic Struggle
 9. The Situated Construction of Narratives
 10. The Power of Stories
 Notes
 References
 Index
 5
 Acknowledgements
 A great many people made this book possible. My helpers
 are dear friends and teachers: Deidre Ashton, Julia Chu, Todd
 Clear, Marilyn Croman, Reuben Danzing, Rob Danzig, Russel Durst,
 Eric Fieldman, Bernadette Fiore, Emily Gaarder, Elaine Gunnison,
 Cyndi Hamilton, Brooke Judkins, David Lundgren, Bernice Mahler,
 Shadd Maruna, Paul Mazerolle, Kumiko Mitarai, Judy Montville,
 Caroline Nicholl, Sharyn Roach Anleu, Michelle Rosen, Joyce
 Sacco, Suhith Wickrema, and Anthony Zitrin. They include my
 financial supporter, the Office of Research and Advanced Studies
 at the University of Cincinnati, and my intellectual comrades in
 the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee.
 Joey Presser was a constant source of encouragement and
 sometime emergency assistance. Ami, Laura Retyi-Gazda, my friends
 in Frontrunners of Cincinnati, and my allies in the March for
 Justice of Cincinnati, made life in Cincinnati worthwhile.
 Administrators and staff of four different agencies generously
 allowed my work to interfere with theirs.
 Thanks to Ed Latessa for his kindness. Thanks to Pat Van
 Voorhis, John Wooldredge, and Frank Cullen for modeling integrity
 and excellence in research. Thanks to Lorraine Mazerolle for her
 boundless intellectual curiosity and insight. Thanks to Robert
 McConaughy for his empathy and wisdom about all things. I am
 especially grateful to my three parents, who live in my heart. My
 father Alex Presser, my natural mother Hilda Winnick Presser, and
 my adoptive mother Helen Presser valued people and education and
 influenced me to do the same. Finally, the book stands on the
 stories of 27 men, for whom I wish peace.
 6
 Been a Heavy Life
 7
 Foreword
 Bruce A. Arrigo
 Ethnographic studies of "dangerous men" have generally
 taken us behind bars. Erving Goffman's (1961) arresting critique
 of the confinement setting as a generative milieu for the
 exercise of power helped to spawn a series of monograph-length
 works recounting life, death, and survival behind prison walls
 (e.g., Clemmer, 1958; Toch, 1977; Jacobs, 1978; Sykes, 1971). A
 second wave of penological analysis, still concerned with
 "everyday experience" behind bars, challenged the correctional
 system as an extension of the state's regulatory ambit. For
 example, Irwin's (1970, 1985) studies of the felon and the jail
 respectively ushered in a new era of incisive commentary. Crime
 control as industry was understood to function as a gulag
 (Christie, 1993), and the American corrections project generally
 was recognized as one of doing harm (Clear, 1994).
 More recent studies have continued the "insider" tradition
 of penological inquiry. To illustrate, investigations documenting
 the life of confined convicts (e.g., Hassine, 2007; Santos, 2006)
 form part of what now is termed "convict criminology" (Ross &
 Richards, 2002), in which the full effects of society's mass
 imprisonment binge are made abundantly clear (Garland, 2004).
 Among other things, we have sacrificed racial minorities (Mauer,
 2006), women (Bloom, Owen, & Covington, 2003), the mentally
 disabled (Haney, 2006), juveniles (Bortner & Williams, 1997),
 families (Mauer & Chesney-Lind, 2003) and even economically
 depressed neighborhoods (Clear, 2007) at the altar of a
 politically ensconced corrections agenda.
 The harm that offenders did or might do in the future
 remains the official but widely accepted justification for mass
 incapacitation. Its flaws are forgiven so long as offenders
 cannot or do not "make good" (Maruna, 2001). Cynically or not, we
 expect offenders to reclaim their lives, and they strive to do
 the same. Theirs is perhaps the more complex effort, for it
 includes resisting the terms in which `reclaiming one's life'
 have been circumscribed (Bosworth, 1999). Resistance takes place
 behind but also, significantly, beyond metal bars and electronic
 fences--in stories and vocabularies for storying personhood,
 manhood, harm, violence. It is at this juncture that we confront
 the brilliant new volume, Been a heavy life: Understanding
 stories of violent men, authored by Lo Presser.
 As the author herself notes, it is not enough to document
 the stories of convicts. We must understand how these stories are
 assembled in the social and institutional world, to grasp both
 the offenders' struggles and the operation of the political
 economy of criminalisation and criminal justice. We must
 recognize the socially mediated construction of personhood--of
 who the "convict" is--through a methodology that builds on the
 insights of labeling theory (e.g., Becker, 1962; Lemert, 1967),
 symbolic interactionism (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934; see also
 Blumer, 1969; Stryker, 1980), neutralization studies (e.g.,
 Maruna & Copes, 2005), and discourse analysis (Arrigo,
 Milovanovic, & Schehr, 2005; Holstein & Gubrium, 2000). This is
 8
 an approach that stresses the value of reflexivity (Bourdieu &
 Wacquant, 1992) and the co-production of historically specific
 meanings (Henry & Milovanovic, 1996). 
 In her thoughtfully researched, skillfully interpreted, and
 thoroughly engaging study, Lo Presser gives us this much needed
 view of the violent offender's narrated, situated identity.
 Embedded in these narratives are statements about the possibility
 of being a good self. Perhaps most illuminating is the discussion
 of the reformist tale (chapter 5 and the "good" self), the
 stability account (chapter 6 and the never "bad" self), the
 elastic narrative (chapter 7 and selfhood as "creative
 integration"), and the heroic story (chapter 8 and internal and
 external morality struggles). Each of these analytic descriptions
 provides considerable breadth and depth to the theoretical and
 methodological foundations of this book. Presser understands that
 narrative is inevitably influenced by others, including by the
 researcher. It is tied to narration, hence context. And, in this
 respect, perhaps her work is consistent with the somewhat auto-
 ethnographic accounts of Liebow (1967), Griffin (1960), and
 Rhodes (2004). To be clear, this orientation only magnifies the
 texturing of Presser's inquiry and the eloquence of her insights.
 In the final chapter of Been a heavy life, the author
 revisits her persuasive thesis that "violent men" are ever under
 construction, discursively and practically--by those men who do
 violence and by those who profit from their control. Given the
 power of (belief in) narrative, heroic stories in which prospects
 for change and possibilities of redemption are seeded in the
 struggle to overcome (Nietzsche, 1968), may be criminogenic.
 But how shall we characterize the struggle to remain human,
 all too human, despite marginalizing and alienating
 characterizations, if not in heroic terms (Nietzsche, 2006)? In
 the realm of penology--especially behind the walls of silence
 that contain and engulf the offender's structures of suffering--
 humanity requires sound policy, sensible practice, and steadfast
 activism. This is the agenda to which Presser purposefully
 redirects our collective attentions, inviting us to rethink those
 conditions that oppress and deny the humanness of us all. To do
 otherwise imprisons the self, whether physically confined as such
 or, equally as profound, psychologically held captive. This is
 the deplorable state of our "freedom"--a state in which we,
 regrettably, erect nothing more than debilitating mechanisms of
 escape from society, from others, and, ultimately, from ourselves
 (Fromm, 1994). Presser's volume is a fascinating assessment of
 how convicts (and society more generally) can indeed overcome
 such devastating suffering.
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 Bosworth, M. (1999). Engendering resistance: Agency and power in
 women's prisons. Sydney: Ashgate.
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 Bloom, B., Owen, B., & Covington, S. (2003). Gender-responsive
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