{"id":878,"date":"2011-01-06T16:24:30","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T21:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/blog\/restorative-justice\/?p=878"},"modified":"2011-01-06T16:24:30","modified_gmt":"2011-01-06T21:24:30","slug":"the-story-is-true","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/restorative-justice\/2011\/01\/06\/the-story-is-true\/","title":{"rendered":"The story is true"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cStories are the way we domesticate the world\u2019s disorder.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

(Bruce Jackson, The Story is True<\/em>)<\/p>\n

My last entry emphasized the importance of story.\u00a0 Since stories are essential to the experience of victims and offenders \u2013 and to all of us \u2013 I want to explore this topic a bit further here.<\/p>\n

Our histories, our identities, our meanings for our lives are understood in and conveyed through our stories.\u00a0 We often experience trauma when those stories are disrupted.\u00a0 The process of transcending trauma requires us to \u201cre-story\u201d our lives.\u00a0 This is true for those who are victimized but it is often true for those who offend as well.\u00a0 As Shadd Maruna and Hans Toch’s suggest in Making Good<\/em>, those who \u201cdesist\u201d from offending behavior do so by re-storying their own lives in ways that preserve their self-respect and provide meaning for their new lives.<\/p>\n

Judicial trials are also about story.\u00a0 Jackson notes in The Story is True<\/em> that trials are a competition between different ways to frame ambiguous material.\u00a0 They are often more about winning more than about truth; the instrument is the development of a plausible story (p. 123).<\/p>\n

Journalism \u2013 and especially television – presents events as stories; it utilizes stereotypical templates to impose a sense of order and completeness on information and the result is often incomplete and even misleading.<\/p>\n

Jackson is an ethnographer who has done extensive work in prison and on death row.\u00a0 He has used both still photography and film in this context.\u00a0 Because of these interests, I have followed his work for years. (For researchers, and especially those working in prison, I also recommend his 1987 book, Fieldwork<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Our lives, and most events, do not unfold in an orderly sequence. To make sense of them, to manage the disorder of the world, we create stories.\u00a0\u00a0 To quote one of Jackson\u2019s students, \u201cOur stories are the dots we use to connect the parts of our lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Stories have to make sense, even when life often doesn\u2019t. Like a photograph, stories are a way of framing things.\u00a0 As with photographs, if we change the frame, a different story may emerge.<\/p>\n

Our stories may or may not be true in a factual sense.\u00a0 But unless we are involved in a forensic inquiry, what matters more in most cases are the meanings and perceptions they portray.<\/p>\n

Jackson reminds us that our stories are created, then revised and fine-tuned over time, to serve various purposes:<\/p>\n