The soundtrack of criminal careers: On music,life courses and life stories

Introduction

When you enter a prison yard in Latin America, the music is striking – surprising and unavoidable. Reggaetón, salsa, cumbia, hip-hop, rock and the latest global pop hits blast out of loudspeakers for hours upon hours, providing a soundtrack to the social interactions in the prison yard and adding to the vibrant and animated atmosphere of prison life. The tunes intermingle with conversations and shouts, and the sounds of people playing sports, washing clothes and selling goods. If you close your eyes, you can imagine dancing in a club or hanging out on a bustling street far removed from the walls of incarceration. But if you open them, you are assaulted by the harsh reality of overcrowding and underfunding even as quieter sounds come from other parts of the prison where religious groups worship, bands rehearse and TV sets entertain. Inside prisons, as outside, music accompanies life.

Criminologists have paid significant attention to the relationship between music and crime (in the multiple and complex meanings of the latter), providing valuable analytical perspectives and underscoring music's constitutive power (Ferrell, 1999; Lee, 2022; Siegel and Bovenkerk, 2021). Criminologists have also made significant advances in the past few years in the study of the importance of sonic prison environments (Herrity et al., 2021; McKay, 2018; Russell and Carlton, 2020). They have shown that carceral sonic environments are highly diverse across the globe and impact individual inmates differently. Criminology, however, still has to incorporate tools to account for the multiple – and often contradictory – roles music plays throughout the lives of those who have committed criminalised acts. In particular, the role that music plays in their life storytelling is by and large unexplored.

In this article we attempt to augment the theorisation of the relationship between music and crime – or the criminology of music. Our starting point are interviews conducted as part of CRIMLA, a research project conducted in prisons in Latin America. In interviews, prisoners talked about the importance of music in their lives inside and outside prison – some even organised their life stories around lyrics. We take up ideas from decades of criminological studies of music and combine them with life-course (Carlsson and Sarnecki, 2016) and narrative (Fleetwood et al., 2019) criminology. The aim is to theorise the fluidity and variability of the roles music plays in people's lives, also in relation to criminality. Our purpose is to better understand the complex changes in incarcerated individuals’ musical taste and the repercussions of this for their identities and self-narratives. To substantiate our approach, we detail the role music has played in the life of four prisoners.

Music in criminology

There is a wealth of studies about music in the history of criminology (Siegel and Bovenkerk, 2021), and the perspectives used to analyse its role in relation to criminality are ever evolving. The discipline has moved beyond initial naïve readings of music as the direct cause of crime that saw humans as black boxes filled with the media's detrimental content (Reiner, 2002). Although the idea that music directly encourages criminal behaviour lives on in political circles, scholars have been swift to demonstrate that this cultural expression is about much more: subcultures (Bennett, 1999), social meanings (Green, 2019) and the texture of cultural life (Bennett, 2001). Scholars have also forefronted the experimental, material, affective and emotional aspects of music. For instance, confronting the demonisation and policing of certain genres, usually those embraced by non-white, impoverished and disenfranchised groups, criminologists have pointed out that such denunciations are shaped by colonial and discriminatory echoes (Fatsis, 2019). Criminology is now populated by myriad approaches that highlight the complexity of the relationship between crime and music.

The criminological study of music has also critically engaged with the debate about the meaning and processes of crime and criminality. In line with Marxist readings of the discipline that indicate that the criminal system is an instrument to achieve ‘subordination through discipline’ (Melossi and Pavarini, 2018/1981: 226), commentators have warned that musical genres are racially criminalised to sustain the hegemonic aesthetic order desired by powerful groups (Brisman et al., 2021), following ‘racist assumptions within processes of state regulation and social control that betray their origins in the history of slavery and European colonial control’ (Fatsis, 2021: 30). Peters (2021: 1) has highlighted the importance of a ‘critical criminology of music’ that embraces a harm perspective and studies the harms perpetrated by the powerful against the disenfranchised that are, nonetheless, not criminalised. Aware of the cultural and political dimensions traversing the social experience of music, Lee (2022: 447) tasks 'musicriminology' with delving into an intricate analysis of ‘music, musicians, and audiences, and the cultures, spaces, and contexts through which they interact with the law, institutions, power, and social control’.

Despite the myriad elements and perspectives that criminologists of music consider in their studies, there are some identifiable tendencies in their approaches. Some of the most conservative studies explore how music indirectly affects antisocial behaviour. This antisocial perspective focuses on the negative impact of music (and the practices around it) and condemns, for instance, its glorification of violence. Based on a study of self-reported identity formation, Dalzell and Cavanagh (2021) argue that young people use music to measure themselves vis-à-vis their peers and mark belonging. The authors suggest that in the fragility of group belonging and peer pressure, music can glue people together around violent practices. Wellinga (2021) explores how narcocorridos, a popular Mexican genre that glamorises drug traffickers and their activity, has become a weapon in the indirect warfare of drug cartels and has resulted in the murder of artists when rival gangs take revenge over unflattering lyrics. Wadds et al. (2021: 14), using data from Australia, argue that carnivals can end up being ‘premised on the pleasure and entitlement of (heterosexual) men’ rather than being the promised transgressive spaces to satisfy the need for release for all people. The antisocial perspective, then, explores how music in conjunction with complex social forces, like exclusion or detrimental imaginaries, can have harmful consequences.

At the other end of the spectrum are studies of how music is prosocial by helping people learn social norms and binding individuals in solidarity and resilience in difficult times. A study by Anderson et al. (2016: 66), for example, highlights that ‘spending more time in productive activities in the presence of capable guardians, such as sports, music, or study groups, is associated with increases in prosocial outcomes’. Regarding solidarity and resilience, de Haan (2021: 174) documents how prisoners in Nazi camps used music to lift their spirits by singing whenever they had the opportunity – a practice that helped them ‘reconnect with their pre-war lives’ and offered them ‘opportunities for imaginative escape into a world outside the camp’. A prosocial criminological approach to music is, thus, any perspective that highlights the social and emotional benefits of music for people at risk of criminalisation.

Significant attention has also been paid to music's anti-establishment potential; this artistic expression as an outlet for the dissatisfaction of groups as a result of oppressive social systems. This approach follows the sociologist Charles Brown (1995: 440) who interpreted blues as a ‘collective response to oppression’ in which Black Americans addressed ‘their cry for freedom’. More recent studies have analysed mumble, a hip-hop subgenre, as ‘a cultural zeitgeist for resistance’ (Omrow, 2018: 44), invited readers to ‘perceive hip hop as a looking glass into road life’ (Lynes et al., 2020: 1214), and interpreted violence in drill lyrics as ‘establishing an artist as an authentic voice of the ghetto, with all the acumen and “cool” that attaches to this’ (Ilan, 2020: 1003). A further example is the work of Kauzlarich and Awsumb (2018), who document the political work of punk rockers in opposing state violence and oppression. The anti-establishment approach suggests that music is used by marginalised communities to claim the social capital and means of expression that society has denied them. In this scholarship, music signals revolt, transgression and rebellion against unjust social systems.

Criminological approaches have thus moved from an initial belief that musical contents directly dictate a person's behaviour – i.e. violent lyrics lead a person to be violent – to understanding that tunes and lyrics are rather a way to construct and dispute the reality with which individuals engage and interpret in complex and ambiguous ways. Willis (2014/1978), already in the 1960s, developed a social-constructivist perspective of the issue by highlighting how two distinct cultural groups (motorbike boys and hippies) used music to challenge cultural meanings dominated by capitalism and produce new understandings to replace them. Two decades later, with the arrival of cultural criminology, the view of music as constitutive of society's cultural fabric was reinvigorated. Ferrell (1999: 395), in his programmatic proposal for an exploration of ‘the convergence of cultural and criminal processes in contemporary social life’, was interested in the role of music as part of the ‘culture wars’ and the disputation of image, meaning, and representation in the social arena. He highlighted the importance of deep cultural immersion and a ‘detailed analysis of popular music's historical and thematic structures’ (Ferrell, 1999: 401) to understand the profound and broad symbolic underpinnings of this form of cultural expression. Years later, Ferrell, this time with Hayward and Young (2012: 137), rejected music as a static influence and invited readers to visualise its fluidity: ‘an “interpretative resource”, a way of “organising” or perhaps more accurately reconstituting reality’.

More recently, Urbanik and Haggerty (2018: 1346) have underscored music's ambivalence. For them, rap functions both as ‘a form of resistance to structural barriers’ and as a means for rappers to increase their street capital (Sandberg, 2008) and their profits from dealing drugs. In other words, these authors invite readers see to this cultural output as discursive and narrative forces that are part of the continuous negotiation and construction of reality. Along the same lines, Crockett Thomas and colleagues (2021: 8) document how song writing allows offenders to challenge ‘the relationships between their selves and their punishment’. Song writing gives inmates about to re/integrate into society the opportunity to compose new identities, reinforce resolutions and reinterpret their experiences of punishment. Hjørnevik et al. (2022: 1) argue that musical therapy in prison affords ‘congruence between the past, the present and the projected future for participants by way of their unfolding musical life stories’. Moreover, in his programme for musicriminology, Lee (2022) argues that the best way to understand music in social life is by studying holistically the three components of sonic spaces: an atmosphere that produces a corporeal impression, a soundscape that ‘refers to the cultural meanings … that constitute the listening experience’ (p. 450), and an acoustic environment (the location) where we produce, listen, or perform.

We build on these studies that highlight two aspects: 1) the ambiguity, complexity, and fluidity in music and soundscapes, and 2) the connection between music and self-stories. Our main contribution, however, is taking a longitudinal view of music in people's lives and exploring the variety of roles it plays in people's life trajectories and life stories. We draw inspiration from life-course criminology and the nascent analytical field of a life-course trajectory of musical taste and, furthermore, emphasise the role that lyrics and tunes play in life storytelling.

Life-course analysis, musical taste and narratives

Life-course analysis is employed widely in the social sciences (Elder, 1998), including criminology (Blokland and Geest, 2017; Laub and Sampson, 1993). A life course is a linked sequence of phases in life ranging from infancy, to childhood, to adolescence, to adulthood and to the senior years. Significant changes – including physiological ones – happen in a person's trajectory during those years, and society constructs expectations for people as they move through the life phases. The individual often interiorises and strives to comply with those expectations. Acknowledging a life course as a sequence of phases is important in sociological analyses because first, ‘the same event may give rise to very different results depending on how old the individual is when it occurs’ (Carlsson and Sarnecki, 2016: 7) and, second, because causes of social phenomena do not operate simultaneously but sequentially, creating the need to ‘deal with a sequence of steps’ (Becker, 1963: 23). Notably, however, life-course literature ‘has largely ignored the influence of life-course stage and age on cultural taste’ (Harrison and Ryan, 2010: 650).

There is evidence of ‘a life-course trajectory of musical taste, which begins with fairly narrow tastes in young adulthood, expands into middle age, and then narrows later in life’ (Harrison and Ryan, 2010: 664). Some scholars have identified the significance of life trajectories and life phases for the role that musical taste plays in the formation of identities (Bennett and Hodkinson, 2020; Hodkinson, 2011) and the accumulation of cultural capital (Rahadianto Sutopo et al., 2017). Taste, including musical, is a form of cultural capital: the ‘long-lasting dispositions of the mind and the body, cultural goods, and educational qualifications’ that people have accumulated through labour and can exchange for social energy (Bourdieu, 1986: 17). Because musical taste is part of people's cultural capital, it plays an important social function like indicating to others who we are (Bourdieu, 1984), marking moral boundaries by stating who we are not (Lamont and Molnár, 2002) and creating social networks by enabling or disabling people to transcend the symbolic boundaries of ‘otherness’ (Harrison and Ryan, 2010: 653). Although criminologists have explored the significance of life phases in ‘the onset, persistence, and desistance of offending behaviour’ (McGee and Farrington, 2019), we argue that engaging a life-course trajectory of musical engagement, taste and narration in association with ‘criminal careers’ (Matza, 1964) accounts for some of the multifaceted, dynamic and seemingly contradictory roles that music plays throughout a life also in regard to criminality. Music, for instance, ‘invokes memories and emotions’ (Harrison and Ryan, 2010: 665) and builds an identity by partially relying on the narratives present in lyrics to construct a sense of who we are and where we are headed.

Musical lyrics are often narratives, defined in criminology as ‘a type of discourse that follows events or experiences over time and makes a point’ (Presser and Sandberg, 2015: 2). Understanding the ‘capacity of stories to explain, guide, and arouse’ (Fleetwood et al., 2019: 1), highlights the significance of music's narrative elements for individuals, social groups and cultures. Lyrics, for instance, help construct life stories through which people ‘provide their lives with unity and purpose by constructing internalised and evolving narratives of the self’ (McAdams, 2001: 100). The life stories people construct are ‘conditioned by culture and context’ and draw on ‘a wide variety of cultural narratives and discourses’ (Sandberg, 2013: 80–81) – including music.

Concepts from life-course and narrative criminology invite us to study how music plays out in the trajectories and stories of individuals who have engaged with criminality. Although emerging from very different epistemological and ontological traditions, both perspectives follow long-term sequences as an uneven continuum. The two are closely intertwined considering how ‘the life course itself’, at least in part, can be analysed as a social construction (Holstein and Gubrium, 2007: 337) often created within and formed through life stories. Combined life courses and life stories may thus add a longitudinal and narrative component to criminological studies of music. These perspectives may furthermore assist in understanding the complex and varied roles that lyrics and tunes plays throughout individual life courses, the stories people tell about themselves, and the relationship between the two.

The sound of crime

Beginning in December 2021, a research team including the two authors of this article conducted life-course interviews with 350 people imprisoned in seven Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras and Mexico (Bolivia was added later). Half of the interviewees were women and the other half men. The team, which also included both women and men, selected participants sentenced for a range of offences: drug trafficking, kidnapping, murder, sexual offences and violent theft. Most often the participants had committed several of these offences and many others for which they had not been sentenced. Each inmate was interviewed several times with some days between sessions. Each session lasted between 1.5 and 2 hours. Interviews were based on an extensive interview guide emphasising family context, childhood, youth, adulthood, crime, drug use, violence, detention, legal process, life in prison and perceptions of victims. We made a point of letting participants tell their own stories, and interviewers were free to probe topics of special interest not covered by the interview guide. Music turned out to be prominent among such topics.

The research project was hosted by the University of Oslo, Norway. Therefore, we sought and obtained authorisation from the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD) to collect and store life stories. We also received authorisation from local ethics committees in the seven Latin American countries where we conducted fieldwork. All participants received an oral and written explanation of their rights in Spanish and Portuguese and agreed to participate. Names and important details from their stories have been anonymised. Considering that most participants had experienced significant psychological trauma, we implemented a trauma-informed approach (Todd-Kvam and Goyes, 2023) that assumed, among other things, that obtaining informed consent from participants was a continuous process across and within the sessions rather than a one-time formality. This approach to consent was of particular importance for Camila who we present below and who has memory loss and learning disabilities as a product of her prolonged use of cocaine derivates. Although her condition did not compromise her ability to consent to her participation, we made sure not to transgress any of her rights or cause harm.

In what follows, we take a closer look at the life stories of four participants: Luis, Daniel, Alejandro and Camila. The first three were interviewed by the second author and the fourth by a female research assistant. We sketch their lives and paths into crime and prison, paying attention to the role of music. The methodological rationale for this selective approach relies on the oral history tradition, which uses interviews to ‘gain insight into great events’ and significant social dynamics (Ritchie, 2010: 4). Simultaneously, we used narrative portraiture for the presentation of our findings, a process that Rodríguez-Dorans and Jacobs (2020: 613) define as ‘selecting and rearranging extracts from interviews, observations, field notes, or documents [to] offer a glimpse into the subjects’ lives’. Narrative portraiture ‘depicts social phenomena through people's stories of everyday life experience [and is] … thus able to bridge the gap between individual and society’. In other words, although we chose to present the profiles of those participants for whom music was particularly important, they represent tendencies evident among the other participants we interviewed. Our cases can thus work as ideal types for more widespread propensities. We focus on life stories to delve into detail and capture the complex and often ambiguous relationship between music and crime. We furthermore hope that what may be lost in terms of a systematic and ‘representative’ analysis is gained in the detailed exploration of nuances and ambiguity of the role that music plays for people who have committed criminalised acts.

Concluding remarks

The relationship between crime and music is fundamentally ambiguous and complex. In Luis's youth when lived on the streets, singing helped build his gangsta persona, but when he transitioned into adulthood and parenthood – much of it spent in prison – music provided him with an outlet for his ‘softer’ emotions. When Daniel was removed from the intense social activity to which he was accustomed, he found a love for music and used it to connect with others, but when he transitioned into wishing for ‘peace and quiet’, writing songs was a form of therapy for him. In his youth, partaking in concerts, parties and raves was a central part of Alejandro's life, which also included illegal work, but as years passed and he suffered the pains of incarceration, including prison-induced depression, music became a therapeutic tool. Most importantly, in his adulthood Alejandro organised his life around lyrics and made his life tellable. Similarly, with a faulty memory, Camila attached events, meanings and feelings to songs. Music allowed her to keep track of an otherwise vanishing life story. Those examples, although admittedly limited and selective, show the variety of roles music played in the lives of those who at some point in their lives committed criminalised acts. They demonstrate that the role of music changes throughout people's lives as they transition into new phases and as circumstances change. This artistic expression can fulfil, in a single life course, all the social roles criminologists have identified through decades of research.

In life-course analyses, some have suggested structuring the phases of life based on an individual's biological development (Wright et al., 2015), others on the traits and changes of relationships along the life course (Waldinger and Schulz, 2023), and still others on the socially constructed expectations for the phase of each individual (Holstein and Gubrium, 2007). Constructivist perspectives reveal how individuals use constructed life courses as a narrative device to understand their lives in a form of biographical work ‘looking back on events and linking them in a pattern leading up to the endpoint that they currently exist [in]’ (Holstein and Gubrium, 2007: 346).

We have shown how music is an important tool with which people keep track of their life story and continuously construct their life course; that is, people use music to recount their past and create and give meaning to their current and future life trajectories. Lyrics provided narratives and tropes that participants used to tell and organise their lives and in this way also shaped them. Illustratively, although life-course criminology has been criticised for its insistence on the study of ‘objective factors’, some have also called for narrative studies of offenders’ careers (Piquero et al., 2007). This call builds on the insight that individuals make ‘decisions not merely based on certain events and circumstances but rather based on their interpretation of these events and circumstances’ (Blokland and Geest, 2017: 2).

As opposed to ‘life as a book’ (McAdams, 2013) or ‘life as a film’ (Canter and Youngs, 2015), music arose naturally in our interviews, solely on the initiative of the participants, as part of a framework to narrative their lives. Signalling the narrative value inmates found in music implies, among other things, that it has the potential to give them a voice through which they can express their views and experiences – often silenced by broad social and institutional dynamics and by the psychological traumas they have experienced. This role of music for life storytelling requires further analysis in criminology and other disciplines studying life stories.

Combining the analytical power of a life-course perspective (Carlsson and Sarnecki, 2016) with narrative criminology (Fleetwood et al., 2019), we showed the advantage of combining temporality and life story in the criminological study of music. While imbuing studies of music in criminology with the deep criminological understandings of music as a constitutive force and the tendencies identified in previous studies regarding the role of this artistic expression in antisocial, prosocial and anti-establishment phenomena, we suggest that exploring musical commitment and taste along a life course allows for a better understanding of the multiple roles it can play, including storytelling. A life-course and narrative approach not only underscores that music in itself is not directly conducive to criminality (because its significance always comes from its interplay with broader structural arrangements), but also highlights that music is performative in complex ways throughout the life-long construction of the identities of those who have committed criminalised acts.

Music is ‘a fellow traveler, a confidant, and an interlocutor’ ¹ in the lives of humans who have committed criminalised acts. In the words of Lee (2022: 449), it is ‘a cultural force and cultural product, an artifact, a sonic “background” that sometimes animates situations, a soundscape for everyday troubles, an acoustic accompaniment to deviance’. Music has a complex link with criminality in our data and only in portions of the lives of the participants, if at all. Music, however, was the soundtrack that gave them an outlet for emotions, opinions, and experiences – often through life storytelling that simultaneously shaped their life course.