“I got caught,but I’m not a loser”: Moral economy and arrest narratives in China's heroin trade

Abstract

Narrative criminology illuminates identity change but less often examines how accounts mobilize moral resources across moral orders. This article reads arrest narratives through a moral-economy lens and introduces co-legibility: the capacity of stories to be readable both in drug-market rules and mainstream respectability. Data are life-course interviews with 18 former heroin dealers and 6 former drug enforcement officers in China, analyzed narratively and thematically. Three practices structure arrest accounts: betrayal (being led in or sold out), loyalty (refusing to implicate others) and “the last time” (intent to stop framed through calculation and restraint). Narratives align drug-market norms—anti-informing, non-implication, reputation, calculation, and self-control—with mainstream notions of keeping one's word, responsibility, care for kin, and not harming others, assembling a morally acceptable self. The analysis treats credibility as a relational fit with a moral order of obligation and sanction, rather than textual style, and offers moral resources and co-legibility as tools for comparing such accounts across settings without judging their real-world acceptance.

Keywords

ex-heroin dealers moral identity narrative construction illegal drug market norms

Introduction

Classic work on accounts and stigma management has shown that what people say after they are caught is part of how the moral order operates. From Matza and Sykes's (1957) “techniques of neutralization,” to Scott and Lyman's (1968) distinction between excuses and justifications, to Goffman's (1963) analysis of stigma and spoiled identity, this tradition has examined how people deflect blame, manage responsibility, and preserve face when they are under accusation. Later work on stigma management and boundary work has further shown that people not only defend themselves as individuals, but also draw lines between “us” and “them” in order to reassert moral boundaries (Copes, 2016; Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock, 1996). These studies identify rich narrative strategies, but they seldom ask systematically how such stories hook into different evaluative contexts. This gap matters because narratives do not end once they are spoken, nor is it enough that they make sense only to the speaker. To function as tools for preserving identity, they must also be intelligible to others and enter cultural frameworks that different audiences use to judge what counts as proper, credible, or understandable.

Narrative criminology pushes this line of work further by treating stories as part of action, identity, and social control rather than mere reflections of prior attitudes (Presser and Sandberg, 2015). It shows how people use stories to present themselves as “not that kind of offender,” to claim victimhood, or to frame change, and emphasizes that such work is interactional and situational. In highly institutionalized settings, people engage in intensive “narrative labor,” adjusting stories to recognizable templates and expectations (Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock, 1996; Warr, 2020, 2023). In prison, prisoners draw boundaries from morally condemned “others” to present themselves as proper subjects, even when admitting guilt (Ugelvik, 2012); in drug markets, dealers shift between victimhood, expertise, and toughness across situations (Sandberg, 2008, 2009). This body of work highlights both agency and constraint in narrative identity, but it also raises another research question: under what vocabularies, relational arrangements, and institutional conditions is narrative labor more likely to gain uptake? This question is especially important for offender narratives, whose audiences often span multiple moral worlds: criminal peers, family members, prison staff, and broader publics. Such narratives therefore cannot remain claims that make sense in only one setting. If they are to manage stigma, or organize a morally acceptable self, they must acquire some degree of legibility across overlapping but non-identical evaluative orders. Yet this problem remains underexplored in research on accounts, stigma management, and boundary work.

China brings these questions into especially sharp focus. Public discourse often stages anti-crime enforcement as a moral drama of punishing evil and promoting good. Judicial practice requires written confessions and standardized forms, creating a predictable narrative environment, while grassroots enforcement adds its own organizational routines. Together, these produce widely understood evaluative languages around crime (Zhang and Dong, 2019). In this context, knowing which reasons “count” is not simply a textual matter, but a matter of evaluative order. Among many offense types, retail drug trading is especially useful analytically. It runs on shared expectations of proper conduct: anti-snitching and non-implication, loyalty and reputation, self-control, and the recognition and management of risk. These work as “moral currencies” that shape interaction and status (Coomber et al., 2016; Copes, 2016; Frith and McElwee, 2007; Grundetjern and Miller, 2019; Hathaway et al., 2018; Laing and Richardson, 2024; Moxon and Waters, 2019; see also Anderson, 1999; Bourgois, 1995; Reuter, 1983). At the same time, drugs in China are strongly condemned and carry intense moral judgment. How dealers use available resources to build narrative identity in such a setting is therefore analytically important.

Following the tradition of moral economy (Sayer, 2011; Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1971), I treat these market norms and everyday expectations as a local evaluative order: shared senses of what is proper or deserved, and the obligations, judgments and sanctions that flow from them. Related work on “grammars of justification” shows that multiple orders of worth coexist; actors translate and align across them, and institutions constantly calibrate who and what count as appropriate (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Fassin, 2013; Lamont, 2000). Within this frame, the issue is not only what dealers say, but how their accounts connect to available evaluative languages. To describe this connection, I use an operational term, co-legibility: a single account that can be read across two evaluative languages, one from inside the market (for example, non-implication and anti-informing, loyalty and reputation, calculation and self-control), and one from broader respectability (for example, keeping one's word, taking responsibility, care for others, restraint or repentance). The concept is meant to make visible how accounts mobilize moral resources from different orders, and why some stories appear more “proper” or intelligible to different audiences. This matters because offender narratives do not operate in a single moral world: to preserve personhood and remain credible, they must do more than offer excuses; they must also become intelligible across evaluative contexts. In this way, the concept extends classic work on accounts and stigma by shifting attention from which excuses or justifications are offered to how stories move across multiple evaluative orders.

Against this background, the article draws on life-history interviews with 18 former heroin dealers in China, and 6 former narcotics officers, asks how former heroin dealers mobilize market rules and broader moral vocabularies to make arrest stories co-legible, and how they organize responsibility, justification and self-placement in these stories. The goal is not to judge whether accounts are sincere or effective, but to clarify how, in the contemporary Chinese anti-drug context, arrest narratives use evaluative vocabularies to sustain an “acknowledgeable” self, and what this implies for narrative identity and moral economy in illegal markets.

From narrative identity to the use of moral resources

“Life as narrative” means that people do more than recall events. They rebuild who they are within shared meanings (Ricoeur, 1984). Coherent selves take shape through stories that make sense within social and cultural systems (Brookman et al., 2011; Ewick and Silbey, 1995; Frank, 2010; Maruna, 2001; Presser, 2018). In criminal contexts, illegality and stigma block public acceptance. Many explanations are heard as neutralizations (Matza and Sykes, 1957). Narrative identity work therefore usually moves on two tracks: resisting stigma and reconstructing the self for the future (McLean and Syed, 2015; see also Sandberg, 2008, 2009; Ugelvik, 2012; Warr, 2020; Stone, 2016).

A key mediator in this process is the use of moral resources. To situate the self within a wider moral world, individuals must draw upon words, duties, and characterizations that are already treated as proper and legitimate by others. Existing studies consistently show that the supply and utility of such resources fundamentally differ by group (Christopher, 2012; Hollway, 2006; Opsal, 2011; Valentine et al., 2019). For instance, mothers with criminal convictions may possess a distinct advantage in this regard. Terms like care, responsibility, and family inherently hold high moral value in mainstream vocabularies. By successfully claiming and actively practicing these duties, these women are often able to effectively translate a difficult past into future-oriented commitments and recognizable respectability; their narratives successfully display resilience and agency (Kreager et al., 2010; Measham et al., 2011; Na et al., 2015; Richards-Karamarkovich and Umamaheswar, 2024). In stark contrast, the setting for people convicted of sexual offenses is profoundly different. Dominant societal discourses are characterized by narratives of dangerousness and incurability, while close institutional control further narrows the pool of usable moral terms (Cubellis et al., 2019; Harris and Socia, 2016). Within this highly constrained structural environment, individual efforts at resistance often cannot construct a stable, redemptive story (Blagden et al., 2014; Hamilton, 2017; Kras, 2022; Victor and Waldram, 2015). This disparity reveals that the core issue is not simply the individual's skill in telling their story. Rather, the success of identity reconstruction hinges on a structural factor: whether recognizable moral words are available for use, and crucially, whether those words possess the necessary capacity to travel across the stigma divide into mainstream ideas of decency and worthiness.

These contrasts point to a more general need. Narrative identity work should be linked systematically to the availability and translatability of moral resources. We need an analytic lens that joins three questions: where justificatory words come from, how they are mobilized, and what the social costs are of not following them. In this article, I build on these insights by treating moral resources as part of a moral economy of illegal markets and by asking how such resources can, or cannot, be made readable across different evaluative orders. This provides the basis for the concept of co-legibility developed below.

Moral economy: A lens on evaluative order and why retail drug trading fits

If narrative identity work depends on available and translatable moral resources, moral economy offers a way to locate those resources in a broader evaluative order. It refers to locally shared senses of what is proper and deserved, and to the obligations, judgments, and sanctions that follow from them (Scott, 1976; Thompson, 1971). Work on regimes of worth and orders of justification shows that several moral languages coexist in society, that people translate and negotiate across them, and that institutions keep adjusting who and what count as appropriate (Boltanski and Thévenot, 2006; Fassin, 2013; Lamont, 2000). Ethnographies of marginalized communities and economies make this concrete: “respect” and “decency” circulate as moral currencies in everyday dealings (Anderson, 1999; Bourgois, 1995), and research on illicit markets and market norms shows that these economies display predictable internal order and coordination rather than pure chaos (Reuter, 1983).

Placing narratives inside such an evaluative order lets us ask a simple but often implicit set of questions: which norms and market rules are supplied as recognizable vocabularies, how people use them to justify conduct and self, and what reputational or relational costs follow when duties are breached. To describe how different moral languages connect, I use the term co-legibility. By co-legibility, I mean that a single account can be read at the same time within two evaluative languages: one set of terms from inside the field (for retail drug markets: non-implication and anti-snitching, reputation and loyalty, keeping one's word and paying debts, calculation and self-control, risk recognition), and another set from mainstream respectability (responsibility, not harming the innocent, honesty, restraint or repentance). The term is descriptive: it helps make visible where “credibility” comes from and how stories draw value from different orders, but it does not claim actual acceptance or outcomes.

Retail drug trading is a good fit for this lens. First, the trade runs on a clear set of internal duties and currencies. Participants talk about not informing on others, not implicating friends, keeping promises, repaying, loyalty, competence, self-control, and risk management; these market norms are active rules in relational networks and daily exchange (Coomber et al., 2016; Copes, 2016; Frith and McElwee, 2007; Grundetjern and Miller, 2019; Hathaway et al., 2018; Laing and Richardson, 2024; Moxon and Waters, 2019), and breaches carry social costs—informing brings contempt, breaking one's word harms reputation, and reckless action signals poor self-control. Second, these internal terms can connect to broader moral talk. Keeping one's word can read as honesty; not implicating others can read as taking responsibility and not harming the innocent; calculation and self-control can read as restraint or repentance. Third, arrest is a dense moment for narration: it comes with formal writing and repeated retellings, and it unfolds under specific enforcement opportunity structures such as informants, statements and routine patrols. At this moment, which reasons count is not an abstract issue; it is a practical one.

Using moral economy in this way offers a clear and workable frame for linking narrative criminology and accounts to research on illegal markets. It shifts attention from producing new typologies of excuses or neutralizations to tracing how arrest stories draw on market norms and mainstream moral vocabularies at the same time, and how those links organize responsibility and self-placement. With this frame, the analysis below follows a pathway from moral resources to their translation across evaluative orders, to the consequences of breaches, without presuming in advance whether stories lead to acceptance or desistance.

Data collection and analysis

This study adopts a qualitative, narrative design and draws on data from a broader project that used life-history interviews to trace the life stories of former heroin dealers in China. At the core of that project were semi-structured interviews understood as extended conversations that follow people across their lives and attend to key turning points in offending and desistance (Atkinson, 1998; Laub and Sampson, 2003; Maruna, 2001; O'Connor, 2000). Rather than asking only for a single “version” of an offense, the interviews invited participants to talk about their childhood and family, first contact with drugs, entry into dealing, everyday routines and relationships in the market, arrest and interrogation, imprisonment and post-release life. This format was chosen because narrative criminology treats stories not just as reports but as work on identity, responsibility and the future, and life-history interviewing allows that work to unfold in participants’ own temporal order (McLean and Syed, 2015; Presser and Sandberg, 2015).

Within this wider corpus of life stories, the current analysis focuses on arrest narratives: the parts of people's stories in which they describe being caught, questioned and having to explain the event to others. In the criminal life course, arrest is both a turning point in behavior and a scene where narrative work and moral evaluation are dense. Interrogations, written statements, family questions, and peer expectations all create demands for explanation. Focusing on this high-density scene of narration makes it possible to see how people mobilize and re-balance moral resources when they are asked to account for their actions across institutional, relational and market audiences at once.

Data collection took place in 2022–2023 in a mid-sized inland city in China. Access and sampling followed purposive sampling with multi-source chain referral. Initial contact was established through the researcher's pre-existing community-based social connections, which led to two separate gatekeepers in different parts of the city. These gatekeepers then contacted potential participants within their own circles. In a setting in which drug convictions remain heavily stigmatized and formal re-entry programs are limited, such personal endorsements were crucial for establishing credibility. Running these two chains in parallel reduced single-line homogeneity and increased variation in age at entry into prison, network position and post-release trajectories. Inclusion criteria for former dealers were a conviction for heroin trafficking, release from custody, ability to speak Mandarin or a local dialect, and willingness to participate in the study. The study did not seek information on current criminal activity or ongoing, unadjudicated acts; invitees were contacted directly, given study information and asked for consent in private.

The final sample includes 18 formerly incarcerated heroin dealers (17 men and 1 woman). Most of the former dealers were born between the 1960s and mid-1970s, were in their late 40s to early 60s at the time of interview and had served long sentences, often more than 10 years, typically entering prison in early or middle adulthood. Participants grew up and offended in urban and peri-urban neighborhoods of the city, where heroin markets expanded in the 1990s and 2000s. In addition, I conducted six supplementary interviews with current and former anti-narcotics officers to clarify how retail markets are policed and how arrests in such cases typically take shape. These officer interviews are used only to provide institutional context and limited triangulation.

Data collection for the core analytic material relied on semi-structured life-history interviews with former heroin dealers, usually 60–240 minutes long. Interviews took place in private or neutral locations chosen by participants, such as homes, small restaurants, or teahouses. With consent, sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed. Interview guides covered the life-course themes noted above but left sequencing flexible so that participants could set their own emphases. Because some people speak more easily in relational settings, a small number of interviews were conducted with family members present, and a few as small group conversations (four to six people). In these settings, each participant gave individual consent, confidentiality rules were explained and anyone could switch to a one-to-one conversation for sensitive topics. In all such cases, the analytic unit remained the individual former dealer. Only the focal participant's own narration of arrest and related events was coded for this article; remarks by family members or others present were recorded only as contextual memos. Group settings thus influenced tone and pacing of narration but not the basic unit of analysis.

Ethics and compliance follow international principles for research with human participants. China does not have a unified social science Institutional Review Board system, so the study received institutional ethics review at the author's university under its social research procedures. Consent was given orally or in writing, depending on participant preference, and covered aims, procedures, audio-recording and the right to skip questions or withdraw at any time. All names in the manuscript are pseudonyms and potentially identifying details are generalized or omitted. Audio files and transcripts are stored on encrypted drives with access limited to the researcher.

The analytic strategy combined narrative and thematic analysis with temporal sensitivity. First, the material was organized along a life-events spine (pre-involvement, involvement, arrest, imprisonment, post-release) to keep sequences and turning points clear. Next, open coding on a subset of transcripts, iterative codebook development, constant comparison within and across cases and analytic memoing were used. The analysis focused on three dimensions: types of accounts, audience orientation, and the evaluative vocabularies people used when talking about arrest and responsibility. To examine how accounts drew on different evaluative vocabularies, parallel coding was applied to key segments. One layer marked market-internal norms (e.g., non-implication/anti-snitching, reputation/loyalty, risk recognition and self-control). The other layer marked mainstream respectability vocabularies (e.g., keeping one's word, taking responsibility, care for family, restraint/repentance). When both appeared in the same segment or in tight sequence, overlap was tagged and context and audience were noted in memos.

Arrest narratives based on the culture of the illegal drug market

“Betrayal”: The backlash of strong ties

In Chinese public storytelling, drug arrests are staged as clear moral drama: dealers are “cunning and ruthless,” officers are “resolute and just.” What interviewees say differs from this media script. They do not frame arrest as “losing to the police.” They more often point to someone who turned them in. This highlights the key role of covert intelligence in real cases, drawing on familiar market values such as not informing, not implicating others, keeping one's word, and loyalty:

At the time I was caught, I can honestly say that if no one had led them to me, they might have never caught me… back then (2000s), there were no surveillance systems, and without informants, reports, or accusations, could they really have caught me? Did our faces say “I'm a drug dealer”? (Jun, male, served 11 years)

This is not only a suspect's claim. Officer interviews confirm that retail-level arrests typically follow four routes: tips from informants or other knowledgeable sources, statements from people already detained, proactive investigations and routine patrols. In the late 1990s and 2000s, electronic surveillance was limited. Officers commonly call intelligence the “lifeline” of drug enforcement, and in practice, reports and statements were the most frequent pathways to arrest. Both routes expose the “dark side” of strong ties in the drug market: they presuppose insiders who once knew each other well turning to reveal, betray, and sell one another out.

In this study, 15 of the 18 former dealers said that their arrest followed someone reporting or testifying against them; furthermore, the larger and more stable a person's sales network, the more often arrest was linked to such betrayal or implication. By contrast, lower-level, self-employed retailers with small and irregular dealings more often described being caught because of inadvertent exposure to routine policing.

Kun (male, served 13 years), a retail-level dealer who had built up a relatively stable mid-sized sales network before his arrest, shows how a single failure inside strong ties can trigger exposure:

That time (when Kun was caught) I went to get the goods myself and wasn't here. Someone called to order 300 or 500 grams, a big amount. I asked him (the informant) to deliver it because I trusted him. Later he got caught and brought people to my place… I opened the door and eight men rushed in and pinned me down. He was standing behind them. I said, “How come it's you?”

Here “I trusted him” and “How come it's you” place the event inside a clear evaluative grid. The market rule of not informing/not implicating aligns with ordinary ideas of not breaking trust and not selling someone out. The story implicitly distinguishes the one who kept a duty from the one who crossed a line, and the police appear less as active moral agents and more as instruments of betrayal: they are the means by which a broken obligation is converted into punishment.

Cong (male, served 15 years) also links arrest to the person who turned him in while marking his own calculation and self-control:

I had a bad feeling that day. I took detours. He called me again and again from morning. I thought he just wanted a hit. I told him I was far away. When I reached the alley, I saw a crowd. I shouted, “Old Ba, come over here.” I turned to get in the car. Four people (policemen) stood by the doors with guns and said: “We've been after you for three years.”

Cong's story emphasizes risk recognition (“I had a bad feeling”), efforts at self-control and caution (“I took detours”), and his assumption that the other man simply “wanted a hit.” When the trap is revealed, the blame falls squarely on the informer and on the police who “have been after him,” while his own role is cast as cautious and competent. In moral-economy terms, he presents himself as someone who meets the expectations of a good trader—alert, restrained—who is nevertheless exposed by another's failure to respect the same rules.

Seen against prior research, these accounts rest on a familiar configuration. Economic action in illicit markets is embedded in strong and repeated ties; trusted partners and regular customers form key resources, and the same embeddedness creates vulnerability when a node fails (Chan et al., 2020; Granovetter, 1973; Yeşilyurt, 2014). Not turning others in and not implicating friends function both as street rules and as moral boundaries (Anderson, 1999), while “snitching” violates rule and morality at once and attracts strong stigma (Åkerström, 1989; Ugelvik, 2014). Existing work, in other words, has mapped the moral economy of retail drug markets: who is expected to do what, what counts as a breach and which sanctions follow.

What the arrest stories add is a narrative accounting of this moral economy and a way of making it co-legible. They re-draw the path from offense to punishment so that the decisive breach lies in betrayal, not in dealing itself, thus shifting where the core violation sits and who has broken which obligation. By locating the decisive breach in someone else's informing, the narrators keep themselves aligned with the market rule of non-implication without having to claim any special heroism: they are the ones who trusted, kept arrangements and were sold out. Resentment at being betrayed by a close tie is also easily readable in broader evaluative terms as an ordinary response to broken trust, and the implicit message that “I would not have done that to him” fits common ideas of loyalty and refusal to harm associates. Betrayal narratives do not deny wrongdoing so much as relocate the core violation and protect an acknowledgeable self across two moral orders.

In the next section, I turn to “Loyalty” stories, where refusal to implicate others and “taking it on oneself” move from the background into the center and become positive moral resources in their own right.

“Loyalty”: Reinforcing self-identity

“Loyalty” appears in the narratives as a way to mark moral position after arrest. Not everyone betrays. Several participants stressed that they did not implicate others when questioned. They framed this as what one should do. In moral-economy terms, they describe a clear moral expectation in which non-implication and refusal to inform are treated as core obligations, and reputational loss follows when those obligations are broken. By insisting that they kept the rule even when it was costly, they turn loyalty into a key moral resource for self-placement. Just as Kun said:

I wouldn't harm my friends like these people. I've always been like this. Loyalty is something I treasure—it can't be bought with any amount of money. It's the most valuable thing. Whether in this business or anything else, without it, you can't get anywhere.

These accounts locate the self within a clear moral expectation, but in a different way from the betrayal stories. There, the narrator highlighted how others broke the rule; here the emphasis is on keeping it. In an enforcement environment where tips and statements routinely extend cases (as officers in this study noted), saying “it was just me” is not a neutral description but a costly choice. Precisely because it accepts legal punishment in order to shield others, this refusal becomes a dense moral resource for self-placement: the narrator can be guilty in law and still claim to have acted properly in relational and market terms.

A family-based case shows how “betrayal” and “loyalty” can blur in practice and why “someone must take it” can become the governing norm. The Lan siblings entered dealing at different points—first the sister (after heavy gambling losses), then the brother. They used sex-work venues to distribute heroin. Kinship provided a base for a family model of retailing but it also involved deception and broken trust. The sister, Lan Jie (female, served around 15 years), took money from Lan Li (male, served around 16 years) several times “to buy stock,” then dodged repayment with claims that the courier had been caught or the police had seized the goods. After being deceived twice, Lan Li insisted on going with her to pick up stock in Shenzhen.

Going together to pick up stock is a serious taboo in this line of work. Family-run operations normally split roles to avoid being taken down at once. This time, they traveled together and were arrested as soon as they stepped off the train. In hindsight, they believed Lan Jie had drawn attention because her network had grown too wide. Lan Li, who had already pulled back from dealing, was implicated by proximity. After arrest, Lan Jie told her brother to admit nothing and to let her take it:

I thought one person should carry it. It had to be like that. The police traced my number. I was the one who brought him in. I didn't care about myself; I'm older. He has a wife and child… I told him not to admit it, whatever you do.

Lan Li did not follow this fully. He was angry about the deception and felt “unlucky,” yet he did not push all blame onto his sister:

She told me not to admit anything. But we two were arrested. If you don't take responsibility, both can face death. If neither speaks, both die. And the stock was in my hands. There was no way around it. That's how the law works. Someone has to carry it.

Here kinship does not erase the rule; it intensifies it. The priority is that someone must take responsibility, and family ties help decide who is more obliged to do so: the older sibling, the one whose number is on record, the one without dependents. The moral economy of the market and the moral economy of kinship converge on the same expectation that “one person should carry it.” At the point of arrest, loyalty and betrayal are especially concentrated because tips and statements can reduce one's own risk. Precisely for that reason, not implicating others and “taking it on oneself” become high-cost duties that narrators can turn into moral resources for self-placement.

Read this way, talk of “loyalty” is not mere self-praise. It is a way of organizing and displaying moral resources. The accounts connect internal market rules (non-implication, keeping promises, loyalty, taking responsibility) with mainstream respectability (honesty, care for kin, protecting those with dependents, accepting one's own punishment). Because these vocabularies can be read together, the stance becomes co-legible: the same decision can be seen, inside the market, as keeping faith with partners, and in broader terms, as taking responsibility and shielding the more vulnerable. The dealer does not claim innocence but claims that he has done what a decent person should do within this moral economy. So, loyalty narratives do not undo the harm of dealing; rather, they allocate obligation and punishment in ways that preserve an acknowledgeable self across two moral orders. This sets up the next theme, “The last time,” where narrators shift from duties to others toward calculation and self-control as the basis for a defensible self.

“The last”: Autonomy and sense of control

Many participants described the event before arrest as “the last time.” They said they had already decided to stop. They framed the final transaction as an endpoint that was interrupted by arrest:

My last time getting caught was when I had already decided to quit, you know? I had made up my mind not to do it anymore. That last time, I still had 460 units left, and I was planning to sell them all and be done with it. (Jun, male, served 11 years)

I wasn't even doing it anymore, but that addiction is still there, so I thought, ‘I'll just do it one last time, save some money,’ and then I got reported. (Yu, male, served 14 years)

By that last time, I really thought I was done. I'd made enough money to retire, it was pretty much all there. (Long, male, served 20 years)

There is no need to ask whether these were in fact the final occasions. Truth in that narrow sense is not the aim here, and leaving drug dealing is in any case a repeated and uneven process rather than a sudden break (Bushway et al., 2001). What matters is how “the last time” organizes experience in hindsight. As a narrative practice, it bundles scattered dealings into a trajectory that leads toward exit and marks arrest as a badly timed interruption rather than as the natural outcome of continued offending. It also shows what narrators treat as key: the decision to stop, the amount still in play, the sense of a line that could have been drawn.

First, this way of speaking works to counter a simple “failure” label. From business and common-sense views, arrest is easily read as loss of competence or falling short. Saying “that was my last time after I had decided to stop” means: I could have exited, but did not do so in time. There is regret and luck in it, but more importantly, the narrator places the self as someone who could still decide when and how to exit, but failed to do so in time. Jun's account fits this pattern. He first lays out the price chain across Guangzhou–Kunming–Ruili–Myanmar and stresses being bold without slipping up and the need not to make mistakes. Only then does he turn to the arrest, making clear that it happened after he had already decided to quit. This ordering matters. By foregrounding competence and calculation before the arrest, and placing the decision to stop before the moment of capture, the narrative frames arrest as a mistimed exit rather than proof of incapacity. In this way, arrest is linked to calculation and self-control rather than simple failure, allowing the narrator to preserve a more self-affirming image.

Second, “the last time” also carries the sense that “I was not that bad.” Through this framing, narrators push back against the double stigma of “offender” and “drug dealer,” positioning themselves as restrained rather than greedy. For example, Long says:

Drugs do harm society; that is true. But I did not harm anyone… people came voluntarily. From another angle, under the criminal law I did commit a crime; this is something one must not touch, otherwise the state would not have anti-drug units… So that last time I was thinking of closing it down; once I had enough for retirement, I would withdraw.

This statement both acknowledges legal boundaries and social harm and emphasizes not hurting others and not being driven by greed. It also ties the intention to exit to a conventional life stage (retirement), forming a moral vocabulary of restraint and remorse.

Seen through this study's lens, talk of “the last time” mobilizes two recognizable sets of moral resources. One set comes from inside the market: calculation, self-control and risk recognition/management. Narrators signal that they understand prices, danger and timing, and that arrest reflects a misjudged moment rather than chronic incompetence. Recklessness, by contrast, would be read as a negative competence signal with reputational costs. The other set comes from broader respectability: restraint, holding back, not harming others, knowing when to withdraw. When these two sets connect, “the last time” becomes co-legible. It explains arrest as a crossing of timing and risk, rather than as a collapse of character, and it supplies a basis for a self who is both capable and willing to stop.

In short, “the last time” places market competence and self-control alongside mainstream restraint and withdrawal as two proofs within one self-story: I could control my dealings rather than being driven by boundless greed and I was willing to stop. At the moment of arrest, narrators use this frame to link responsibility, justification and future orientation, keeping the self readable across the two evaluative languages without direct contradiction. These narratives do not erase criminal harm; they re-arrange timing, motive and risk so that the same person can be seen as a competent trader who misjudged a final step and as someone already on the way out of dealing.

Conclusion and discussion

This article has examined how former heroin dealers in China narrate their arrests and how these stories draw on, and rework, the moral economy of retail drug markets. Focusing on three recurring themes—betrayal, loyalty, and “the last time”—the analysis has shown how narrators locate the decisive violation in others’ informing, present refusal to implicate partners as a costly form of loyalty, and frame arrest as interrupting a planned exit from dealing. Across these themes, arrest appears not simply as a turning point in the life course (Bushway et al., 2001; Carlsson, 2012; Copp et al., 2020), but as a moment in which obligations, blame and punishment are redistributed and a defensible self is assembled (Li, 2025). Using the notion of co-legibility, the article has argued that these accounts do not simply reproduce the moral economy of retail drug markets. Rather, they rework it by linking market-internal norms to a broader language of respectability, allowing the same arrest story to become readable across two evaluative orders at once.

Conceptually, the analysis extends classic work on accounts, neutralization and stigma management in three ways (Maruna, 2001; Matza and Sykes, 1957; Presser, 2009). First, it shifts attention from types of excuses and justifications to the sources of their credibility. Instead of asking only what offenders say to deflect blame, arrest stories are treated here as occasions on which actors mobilize specific moral resources whose value depends on the evaluative order in which they are read. This brings the moral economy of illegal markets into conversation with research on accounts and symbolic boundaries: non-implication, loyalty, risk management and restraint appear as “currencies” whose worth is locally defined and whose breaches attract predictable sanctions (Anderson, 1999; Copes, 2016; Laing and Richardson, 2024). Second, the article brings the problem of multiple audiences to the center. Much research on accounts implicitly imagines a single audience, often the state or an abstract “public.” Here, narrators speak at once to former partners and to mainstream others. Betrayal and loyalty stories protect standing inside the market while also presenting betrayal as a familiar violation of trust (Ugelvik, 2012, 2014). “The last time” stories show that one can be a competent dealer and still ready to stop, echoing work on criminal self-efficacy and “successful criminal” identities while shifting the focus to exit and timing (Brezina and Topalli, 2012; McCarthy and Hagan, 2001; Ung and Lloyd, 2024). The concept of co-legibility captures this effort to move between evaluative orders without resolving them into one. Third, the analysis suggests that narrative criminology can benefit from treating arrest stories not only as desistance scripts but as micro-sites where moral boundaries are renegotiated (Presser, 2018; Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016). Rather than simply signaling change or persistence, these stories show how actors relocate the core violation and reassign deservingness of contempt and punishment.

Empirically, the article locates these processes in the contemporary Chinese anti-drug context, a setting that has so far received limited attention in narrative criminology and market studies (Li, 2024). This context is marked by strong public condemnation of drugs, highly standardized confessions, and routine use of intelligence and statements in enforcement (Fassin, 2013). Within this environment, betrayal narratives make visible how heavy reliance on informants is experienced and narrated from below. Dealers do not deny legal guilt, but they insist that the morally decisive act is informing on partners and that contempt should attach to informers rather than to those who are “caught in the act,” resonating with research on snitching and inmate codes in other contexts. Loyalty narratives show how refusing to implicate others, or “taking it on oneself,” becomes a high-cost obligation that can be converted into moral capital: someone must carry the case, and the one who does so can claim both market integrity and care for kin. “The last time” narratives reveal a different configuration, one in which market competence and self-control are placed alongside mainstream restraint and withdrawal. Here, narrators acknowledge harm and illegality while insisting that they had already decided to stop and were not driven by boundless greed, echoing insights from desistance and identity research while grounding them in the specificities of drug dealing careers (Liu and Bachman, 2021; Morash et al., 2020; Na et al., 2015). Taken together, these patterns suggest that retail drug markets are structured not only by prices and risks, but also by evaluative hierarchies of decency and disgrace that continue to operate at the moment of arrest.

Methodologically, the article makes a case for treating arrest narratives as a specific analytical site. Much narrative criminology has focused on life stories of change, on long desistance trajectories and on redemptive scripts (Maruna, 2001; Presser, 2009; Sandberg and Ugelvik, 2016). By contrast, attending closely to how people talk about the moment of being caught highlights other dimensions of narrative labor. Arrest stories concentrate on questions of who betrayed whom, who kept or broke which obligations, and how far moral agency can be claimed in a situation of institutional constraint. They are also shaped by a distinctive institutional form: written statements, standardized confessions and repeated retellings in court, family, and peer settings. Analyzing these stories through moral economy and co-legibility shows how narrators work with, and against, these formats.

The findings also speak to the governance of illegal markets. When enforcement relies heavily on intelligence and statements, it not only shapes arrest patterns but also reconfigures the field's moral economy. Betrayal becomes both attractive and despised, while loyalty becomes riskier yet more valuable for self-placement. Narratives that relocate violation onto informing and dignify “taking it on oneself” suggest that cooperation with authorities may carry high moral costs, even when it brings legal benefits. This helps explain why some enforcement tools generate deep resentment and why some actors prefer punishment to implicating others, with implications for how practitioners think about trust, responsibility, and “good subjects” in post-arrest interactions and rehabilitation programs (Rhoden et al., 2022; Warr, 2020).

More broadly, the framework of moral resources and co-legibility may travel beyond this case to other illegal markets and penal settings. It offers one way to trace how people under criminalization try to remain acknowledgeable selves when law, market, and everyday morality do not line up. The stories analyzed here are therefore not only about heroin dealing and arrest in one national context, but about a broader problem: how those marked as offenders draw on available moral resources to remain intelligible, if not always acceptable, to others.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Dong Li

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Chongqing Municipal Education Commission, Chongqing Municipal Social Science Planning Fund, (grant number 25SKJD071, 2024BS053).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Dong Li is a lecturer in Social Work at Chongqing Normal University. Her area of research is narrative criminology, post-release life, and drug-related crime.

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