Re-storying punishment: How China's long-term ex-heroin dealers turn emotional fissures into moral narratives

Prison space and emotional fissures

Classic prison sociology has long emphasized the repressive and depriving nature of incarceration. Sykes (1958) argued that “the pains of imprisonment” mainly come from the loss of freedom, lack of material goods, restricted autonomy, broken social relationships, and a loss of safety. This “deprivation of power” is seen as a core part of how punishment works. Clemmer (1958) developed the idea of “prisonization,” showing how prisoners, under long-term institutional control, gradually form their own cultural coping system, internalizing the rules of the prison. Goffman (1961), from the perspective of “total institutions,” further described how prisons manage space, time, and bodies to cutoff all contact between the individual and the outside world, creating fully disciplined subjects.

While this classic approach clearly reveals the repressive nature of prison space, it pays less attention to the fissures that might exist within it—moments or places where prisoners show agency even under tight control. In recent years, scholars have started to focus on “emotional fissures” in institutional settings, asking how prisoners might find small ways to express emotions and rebuild a sense of self even in closed and harsh environments. Crewe et al. (2014) proposed the concept of emotional geography, showing that prison space is not purely repressive but composed of different “emotional zones” that allow limited expressions of care and connection. Building on this, Laws and Crewe (2016) found that male prisoners actively manage their feelings within these zones—choosing when and where to display emotions, whom to trust, and how to sustain a social mask under the pressures of masculine and self-protective prison culture.

Moving beyond this spatial focus, subsequent research has shifted attention from where emotions emerge to how they operate as forms of moral and identity work. In this view, emotions are not only shaped by space but also constitute a mode of self-regulation and ethical negotiation (Hoskins and Cobbina, 2020). Umamaheswar (2021), for example, shows how shame, isolation, and vulnerability trigger identity work among male prisoners; Laws (2018) describes how long-term suppression of emotions resurfaces as violence or self-harm; and De Jong et al. (2022) highlight the role of family visits in sustaining emotional connection and future-oriented meaning. Together, these studies demonstrate that prisons are not only spaces of deprivation but also sites where emotions and identities are continuously produced, contested, and reinterpreted—laying the groundwork for understanding how such emotions are later reorganized through narrative reflection after release.

However, most of this research is based in Western settings, especially in more open or decentralized prisons. These studies assume that prisoners can access some flexible spaces, have chances to express feelings, and join in informal social contact. But in countries like China, where prisons are highly controlled and spatial functions are very uniform, it is still unclear how prisoners develop emotional fissures and adjust their identities. Also, most studies focus on emotional experiences during incarceration, few have looked at what happens after release—how delayed emotions and meaning-making processes emerge in later storytelling.

Narrative criminology and identity reconstruction

Narrative criminology provides a key theoretical framework for understanding how the experience of punishment is reorganized. Its starting point is that people not only engage with the world through their actions but also understand and reconstruct their place in it through storytelling (Fleetwood et al., 2019; Warr, 2020). By narrating, people connect scattered experiences, emotions, and moral judgments to give their lives a sense of coherence and direction (Copes, 2016; Maruna, 2001; McAdams, 2001; Presser, 2009). Therefore, narrative has a dual meaning: it is both a tool for making sense of the world and a form of moral practice.

Analytically, narrative criminology typically analyzes this meaning-making process on two related levels. The first is the reorganization of narrative structure and identity. Researchers often focus on a story's event sequence, plot patterns, and turning points, as well as how the storyteller positions the “past self” against the “present self.” This analysis reveals how individuals negotiate their identity between continuity and rupture, acknowledging past wrongs while establishing a new sense of moral legitimacy and direction for their lives (Copes et al., 2008; Sandberg, 2016; Sandberg et al., 2015). Narrative, from this perspective, becomes the crucial lens for understanding identity reconstruction (Vaughan, 2007). It moves beyond simply showing how official reform discourse is met with compliance or resistance, to reveal the active process by which individuals forge institutionalized punishment into a significant part of their biography.

The second level is the reconfiguration of emotion and moral meaning. Narratives do not just record emotions; they reorganize them and give them new significance (Jewkes, 2012; Loseke, 2007; Riessman, 2008). Feelings such as shame, remorse, anger, and attachment are repositioned within the story, becoming key resources for moral judgment and self-understanding. As Presser (2016) argues, moral storytelling is itself an ethical practice, as people redefine the boundaries of “good,” “bad,” and “forgivable” in the process of explaining their own actions. This process reveals how emotions and disciplinary power work together in a narrative to shape a person's ethical identity (Brookman et al., 2011; Di Marco and Sandberg, 2024). Put differently, the act of storytelling is not a mere recitation of past suffering but a direct intervention in the process of punishment itself. It is a constant recalibration of emotion, morality, and institutional pressures that ultimately forges a new self.

Taken together, existing work shows substantial overlap between thematic/structural analyses of narrative and analyses of affect and moral meaning. However, this separation often obscures the dynamic interplay between the two, risking treatment of narrative structure as a mere container for emotional content, rather than as an active force in its production. This article proposes an integrated analytical synthesis that makes this linkage explicit and operational. At its core, the approach treats observable narrative cues—event order, turning points, shifts in footing—not as background elements, but as the very sites where affective and moral work is performed. By systematically tracing how shifts in moral vocabulary and self-positioning align with these structural moments, the analysis moves beyond a static inventory of events or feelings. The focus thus shifts to a dynamic, traceable account of how form and meaning coproduce one another, providing greater methodological rigor and rendering visible the moment-by-moment process of identity work as it unfolds through storytelling.

Further, a large strand of narrative research ties identity talk to desistance (Giordano et al., 2002; McNeill, 2015; Presser, 2010; Sampson and Laub, 1993). However, it frequently omits a crucial step: retrospectively appraising punishment itself. This appraisal is not a binary judgment about legitimacy but a redefinition of what punishment has meant in the narrator's life. Temporal distance and the postrelease context allow storytellers to reorder events, reassess emotions, and revise evaluations, thereby revealing the after-effects of punishment beyond custody. Punishment continues in memory and storytelling, where it is reactivated, emotionalized, and moralized. Bringing this step into view addresses a gap in the literature and provides a clear theoretical and methodological point of departure for the analysis that follows.

“Suffering”: The Breakdown of Identity

The word “suffering” appeared extremely frequently in interviews when participants described their time in prison. This suffering had two overlapping but slightly different aspects: “physical suffering” and “emotional suffering.” Physical suffering was usually concrete and focused mostly on the hard labor inside prison.

Gao Keng (male, served 19 years) said that around 2000, when he first entered prison, management was still rough. Almost all daily activities centered around labor. Usually, the prison took on outsourced factory jobs, then assigned them to inmates. ¹ In fact, prison-run businesses were not new. Under the older model of “prison-enterprise-community integration,” prisons not only carried out correction and punishment but also operated for-profit businesses and took on social functions, such as running hospitals and schools (Zhang and Hu, 2017). After China's shift to a market economy, this model changed. Prisons had to separate from their enterprises, and these businesses became independent market players, responsible for their own profits and losses. Economic performance then became a key measure of prison operations (Li et al., 2019).

The prison where Gao Keng served made glass crafts. Inmates were responsible for cutting, grinding, and polishing—work that required precision but offered little rest. “We'd be up at five to grind glass, all day until midnight,” he recalled, “the bed wasn't even warm yet before we were up again.” Many described the early 2000s as a period when prison life revolved entirely around production. Da Mao, who served five years in another facility, remembered assembling festival lights through the freezing winter: “My hands were totally numb… that kind of suffering scared the hell out of me.” These accounts show how punishment was lived through the exhaustion of the body. The pain of prison was not abstract—it was repetitive, measurable, and inescapably physical.

Yet for many, suffering also carried a moral and emotional weight. Lan Jie (female, served 15 years) was in a women's prison, but the early days, she said, were “no easier than in the men's unit.” Even now, she remembers those days vividly:

I went into prison on April 8, 2004. It was really hard in the beginning. We got up around five in the morning and worked until after nine at night. No break at noon either. The worst and dirtiest job I ever did was unclogging the toilets. Damn, the smell could kill you! Someone like me, used to a good life outside, how could I ever imagine doing that? Before prison, I had a name, a face, people respected me. I didn't even do chores at home. But inside, I had to clean up shit! When I came out, even my ears smelled like it. My whole body stank. Ugh, really—sometimes I lie in bed now and think, that was not a life for a human being.

The harsh reality of prison life, the unexpected intensity of labor, and long, uncertain sentences hit many drug dealers like a heavy blow during their early days behind bars. This period was often described as the hardest to endure. But in Lan Jie's account, she pointed out something even more significant: for those who were “used to a good life,” the suffering was especially unbearable. In other words, the pain was not only due to long work hours but it also came from the forced break with their old, indulgent lifestyles. The prison system imposed a total change, creating a deep split between whom they were before and who they were now. This kind of break is what Goffman (1961) referred to as “self-mortification” experienced in total institutions.

Many ex-drug dealers, though not at the top of the chain, still had some control and respect in the heroin street market. They had access to resources, regular customers, and social gatherings where they were often called “brother” or “boss.” Research has shown that this feeling of empowerment gained from participating in the drug trade is one of the reasons why some drug dealers find it hard to walk away from crime (Fast et al., 2017; Grundetjern & Miller, 2019). But in prison, that sense of superiority is completely shattered. Their old social status disappears, and even their basic personal rights—like control over their own bodies or decisions about labor—are stripped away. Kun (male, served 13 years) described:

Let's say we're supposed to finish at six. But if the officer needs to hit a production target, or something has to be redone, he might tell you all to work one more hour, or even longer. It's not like the officer is just sitting there. They've got targets too, they're competing internally. If things aren't done, he'll make everyone on the line stay and keep working. What can you do? People curse out loud, everyone's cursing. But what use is that? You're angry, so what? There's no way out. We're prisoners. What rights do we have?

Today, China's prison system has undergone decades of reform, modernization, and standardization. ² In terms of procedures and inmate treatment, conditions have clearly improved. Still, even with more humane physical infrastructure, the emotional pain of imprisonment remains intense. Being cutoff from freedom, separated from family, living with loneliness, forced compliance, uncertainty about the future, and blows to one's identity—these wounds don't vanish simply because of shorter work hours (Jewkes, 2005; Liebling, 2011). The hardship of prison life is never just physical. Regardless of policy changes, the suffering rooted in loss of human dignity remains central to the carceral punishment system (Bosworth, 1996; Crewe, 2011). As noted by Goffman (1961), what the institution expects from your behavior always reflects what it thinks of you, and based on that, it works to reshape how you think and act. The pain enforced by the prison serves the purpose of creating a new identity that fits the institution's expectations. Kun's comment—“We're prisoners. What rights do we have?”—is a powerful example of that internal transformation.

In sum, the stories of suffering often serve as the narrative point of origin through which punishment is remembered and made meaningful. For many participants, recalling the early moments of incarceration—those first shocks of exhaustion, fear, and humiliation—was like returning to the scene where their old sense of power collapsed. The lingering “fear” they described signals more than trauma; it marks the moment when punishment began to work by breaking the self that existed before. In later storytelling, this breaking point becomes a moral and emotional anchor, a way to explain how one was once destroyed and then remade. Suffering thus forms both the substance and the structure of their narratives: it is the memory through which prisoners define what it meant to become a “prisoner,” and the beginning from which all later reflections on change and redemption unfold.

“Endurance”: Self-adjustment

“Endurance” emerged as a frequent theme following “suffering,” representing one of the most common ways prisoners coped. Da Fei (male, served 17 years) even tattooed the Chinese character “Ren” (“忍”) onto the base of his right thumb while in prison. When I first met him, I immediately noticed the faded blue mark on his hand. It was eye-catching, but lacked any of the artistry one might expect in a tattoo—it was crooked, clumsy, and clearly carried special meaning. When I asked about it, Da Fei gently touched the character and said:

Back then, I honestly wanted to go at that guard. I even had thoughts of killing him, I swear, and to be honest, everyone felt like that—ten out of ten. But in the end, no matter what, some things you just have to put up with. If I didn't have that word (“ren”) there, I probably wouldn't even be alive now…Being tough gets you nowhere. If you lose your temper or start trouble, the consequences hit hard. Say I've got one year left. I break the rules, get six more months added. That's not even the worst part—all the sentence reductions I'd earned before? Gone. I'd have to start over. So yeah, you've got no choice. You keep your head down and endure it.

Clearly, endurance here carries a sense of repression, helplessness, and reluctant acceptance. It is often the only workable strategy when faced with overwhelming hardship. Prisoners sometimes also used what Scott (1985) calls “weapons of the weak”—slacking off during forced labor, quietly cursing guards, or testing the limits of prison rules. But these actions still fit within the logic of endurance: despite their anger and sense of injustice, they ultimately did not openly resist or break the rules. In the end, Da Fei endured. Even though he once had the urge to kill, he later became a well-behaved prisoner, eventually promoted to oversee an entire production line as a team leader.

However, endurance is not always a calculated choice based on rational cost–benefit analysis, sometimes it comes from emotional ties—what people call human feeling. Long Bo (male, served 20 years) said he began to learn to endure mostly because of his attachment to his family:

I don't even remember when I started to change. Maybe five, six years in? Not sure. At the beginning, I really thought there was no way I'd make it out alive. So I just messed around, got into fights all the time. I'd never be one of those who bowed down to the guards, no way. But the turning point? It was my mom…One year, she had trouble walking…I told her, don't come anymore...If something happened to her, I wouldn't be able to live with that. So after that, I thought about it, and I said to myself—just stay calm, be quiet, endure it.

For Long Bo, endurance was no longer mere submission to authority but a way of protecting something more precious. While the outward behavior—obedience—looked the same, its moral logic differed completely. Enduring for fear of punishment involves humiliation and self-loss; enduring for family preserves a fragile sense of dignity. As several participants said, it was not “being someone's dog” but “being someone's son.”

These variations show that endurance carries no single moral value. Rather, it reflects the meanings individuals attach to suffering—whether through compliance, calculation, or care—all as ways of surviving the moral rupture that punishment brings.

Besides, closely related to endurance is the idea of adjusting one's mindset, which often refers to the emotional ability to survive a harsh environment by accepting, adapting, and mentally reconstructing one's reality. Cong (male, served 15 years) emphasized this while talking about his time in prison:

You can't say you didn't suffer in there—that would be a lie. But being restricted, that's just normal in prison. You break the law, you get punished—that's how it works. I think one ability I have is being able to adjust my mindset quickly. I just tell myself to accept reality. When I got the life sentence? Of course it hurt. But I got over it fast. The place sucks, life is hard, it's tiring—what can you do? You just endure it…Everyone has something that keeps them going. If you want to live, if you want to get out, you'll find that thing. That's what it means to be human.

For him, adjustment meant transforming suffering into something thinkable, even bearable. Lan Jie, who served fifteen years in a women's prison, expressed a similar view. When she learned of her mother's death but was denied permission to attend the funeral, she said she could only “keep it inside.” For her, “adjustment” was not resignation but containment—an effort to manage unbearable emotions within a tightly regulated world.

Endurance, then, is a complex expression of human agency, a multifaceted act of suppression, compliance, and adaptation born from the will to survive in an environment with little room to maneuver. It is precisely through this process that suffering is transformed: rather than being a force that shatters identity, it becomes the very ground upon which moral repair can begin. While the initial shock of imprisonment naturally triggers reactions of anger and resistance, these impulses, as exemplified by Long Bo's early struggles, are ultimately counterproductive, leading only to deeper suffering. The stark reality of prison life dictates that if one is to survive, one must endure. This pivot from resistance to endurance is not a passive resignation but an active search for psychological anchors and new sources of meaning (Schinkel, 2014). Whether motivated by rational calculation, family bonds, or sheer mental flexibility, the moment an inmate begins to endure and come to terms with their suffering, a crucial turn is made. The broken meaning system has a chance to be reassembled, transforming the act of enduring from a mere tool of survival into the first step toward genuine reconstruction.

From a theoretical perspective, endurance operates as an emotional and narrative hinge—a mechanism that mediates between the dissolution of identity and its reconstruction. It transforms the language of pain into the language of reflection, turning survival into a moral and interpretive act. This process exemplifies how emotional regulation in confinement can evolve into a moral labor of self-making (Crewe, 2011; Liebling, 2011; Maruna, 2001). In this sense, endurance represents more than adaptation to power; it marks the first moment of self-narration through which prisoners start to locate moral meaning within the very experience of punishment itself.

“Affection”: An alternative morality

Prison life isn't defined solely by hostility and suffering. As a micro-society, it also contains moments of warmth. When participants recalled their time inside, descriptions of hardship were often interrupted by small acts of care—gestures that complicated the emotional texture of imprisonment. These mixed recollections did not cancel out suffering; rather, they revealed the affective complexity through which punishment was lived and remembered.

Most of these moments were rooted in relationships, especially two kinds: between officers and inmates, and among inmates themselves. As Liebling (2011) noted, officer–prisoner interactions are part of a prison's moral performance: fairness, decency, and safety influence inmates’ well-being and their potential for rehabilitation.

Lan Jie offers a vivid example. While her stories were often filled with frustration, she also remembered an officer who “treated us like sisters.” The officer once brought her homemade soup when Lan Jie was sick and quietly replaced the poor-quality prison underwear with new ones. “When someone's kind like that,” Lan Jie said, “of course you behave. You don't break rules. What could they possibly want from us? We're prisoners. So if they care, it's real.”

Similarly, Long Bo began with anger—demanding prison reform—but his tone softened as he remembered:

Some officers were decent. One looked at my file, saw I'd done years, no sentence reduction, lots of fights. He asked, ‘What's keeping you stuck?’ I said, ‘Every day is exhausting, and the food's awful.’ He told me, ‘Everyone's dealing with it it's not just you.’ Then he said, ‘If you're just missing cigarettes, I'll get you a pack.’ Another time, after work, he called me outside, set down a cigarette, and asked about my kids, told me to take care of myself, said I could talk to him anytime…I started thinking differently. Sentence reduction or not, what did that matter to him? It was my life.

These small gestures took on deep meaning because they came from authority figures. As discussed earlier, suffering inside stems not only from harsh labor but from losing basic human rights, especially the right to be treated with dignity. Within such deprivation, even minor acts of recognition carried enormous moral weight (Halsey and Deegan 2017). For many former drug dealers, who once enjoyed power and respect on the street, this acknowledgment was not just kindness but a symbolic restoration of moral worth. It reminded them that they were still capable of being seen as persons.

Yet these gestures weren't dramatic. They emerged in mundane exchanges—a bowl of soup, a shared cigarette. Their very ordinariness made them powerful. When a system works through emotional deprivation, ordinary kindness becomes transformative. It softens the moral asymmetry between officer and inmate and introduces what Liebling (2011) describes as the prison's moral and emotional climate, one that allows both parties to act within, yet momentarily beyond, the rules. In the prisoners’ later stories, these fragments of care often reappeared as turning points. They provided emotional anchors through which suffering could be reinterpreted, linking endurance with reflection and turning institutional control into the raw material for moral narrative.

In other cases, affection came from fellow inmates. Western prison studies often focus on hierarchy, exclusion, and distrust (Liebling and Arnold, 2012; Shrivastava, 1973). Some even argue that sharing a cell can worsen perceptions of prison (Molleman and van Ginneken, 2015). Yet in the Chinese context—where more than a dozen inmates may live together in a single cell—emotional reciprocity takes on a stronger moral weight. Yupi (male, served 14 years) described it simply as “eating from the same pot.” When someone's family sent food or alcohol during visits, everyone shared. “If one person's happy,” he said, “everyone should be.” Lan Jie also saved condiments and dried pomelo peel to make snacks for her cellmates. “They loved it,” she laughed. “That little flavor made the day easier.”

These exchanges were not exceptional but woven into the fabric of daily life. Gao Keng and Long Bo—two men who had never met before prison—formed a friendship through illness and care. Gao Keng, transferred to the infirmary after years of glasswork left him coughing blood, met Long Bo, who was recovering from a factory injury. “Being sick in prison isn't a rest,” Long Bo said. “It's shameful—you feel useless.” Yet Gao Keng looked after him, changing bandages, washing clothes, and bringing food. “We were the closest of the close,” Long Bo recalled. “He helped me like a brother.” Gao replied quietly: “In there, if you can't do something, I help; if I can't, you help.” Their bond endured after release; when I met them, they still called each other brother.

From a narrative perspective, affection (“qing”) occupies the fissure between suffering (“ku”) and endurance (“ren”). It is not simply an opposite force but an emotional dimension that renders the experience of punishment more layered and complex. For many respondents, it was in moments of emotional flow—being understood, cared for, or able to trust others—that punishment ceased to be a purely repressive experience and became part of a fuller human story. This complexity is especially visible in retrospective narratives. For those still incarcerated, affection is often seen as the emotional counterpoint to pain, a fragile but vital force that resists loneliness and institutional coldness (Solbakken and Wynn, 2022). Yet for those reflecting after release, “qing” becomes embedded between suffering and endurance—the softest yet most enduring trace of punishment. It holds attachments and suppressed humanity, transforming narratives of punishment from a binary of control and redemption into an exploration of emotional continuity—the part of punishment that lingers after it has formally ended.

“Reflection”: The reconstruction of meaning

We have explored three interconnected but distinct aspects of the lives of former drug dealers in prison. Whether it is suffering or warmth, submission or resistance, each forms part of their moral experience behind bars. Together, these elements contribute to their reflections on right and wrong, good and evil, and eventually feed into a reconfiguration of their meaning-making frameworks. After enduring a range of emotional and moral experiences previously unfamiliar to them, many inmates began to move beyond rigid moral binaries, they came to realize that the boundaries between good and bad are neither fixed nor universally clear. Gao Keng put it this way:

After all these years in prison, I can tell you, there's no such thing as purely good people or bad people. Even someone who's killed someone, how many of them really meant to do it? It's like getting into a fight. We fight, I hit you, and you die. But I didn't go into it planning to kill you. So how do you judge a person? Some people say someone is bad ‘by nature,’ but what does that even mean? I've done my time, and some of my best friends now are guys who've been through the same. So what's the standard? If I like you, I say you're not bad. If I don't, I say you are. That's all.

From the standpoint of prison rehabilitation, this may not seem like the “correct” kind of thinking. After all, many correctional programs aim to get inmates to admit their guilt and internalize a sense of moral failure (Garland, 1997). However, substantial evidence suggests that instilling guilt or shame does not reliably support desistance, cognitive restructuring programs often fail to foster long-term prosocial behavior and may oversimplify the moral and social realities of offenders (Maruna, 2001; Ward and Brown, 2004; Wilson, Bouffard and Mackenzie, 2005).

In this light, Gao Keng's reflections shouldn't be dismissed as mere denial or neutralization of guilt (Sykes and Matza, 1957). Instead, they may reflect a form of moral recovery. By recognizing that standards of right and wrong are not absolute, he can detach himself from the moral stigma society places on “offenders.” This helps him resist being trapped in other people's moral judgments. And by rejecting the idea of an essentialized “bad nature,” he's able to maintain a relatively positive self-image—something crucial for eventual reintegration (Braithwaite and Mugford, 1994).

Cong, in summarizing his 15 years of imprisonment, expressed a similar awareness of the world's moral complexity. But unlike Gao Keng, who focused on questioning moral categories, Cong's reflection centered more directly on the prison itself:

I learned a lot there. But to be honest, I also saw and experienced the darker side of society. I saw the ugly side of institutions, of people. Sure, that was more in the past, but it's not like those things are gone today. That said, I don't hate anyone. Not at all. The prison system has improved a lot over the years—the food's better, the officers are more professional, and the rewards system is more fair. But absolute fairness? That doesn't exist. That's just how the world works. But I don't let that eat me up inside.

Like Cong, many former drug offenders did not shy away from talking about the harshness or injustice they experienced in prison. But at the same time, reflection surfaced throughout their narratives. Jun (male, served 11 years) similarly emphasized that there is “no simple good or bad” when reflecting on the prison system. He did not see his own imprisonment as proof that the penal system was unjust; rather, he believed that the system itself pursued order and stability, even if its implementation was often imperfect. Such reflections reveal that punishment, for many, was no longer viewed solely as coercion but as a process intertwined with morality, power, and social reality. Some respondents even expressed positive reflections on their time in prison, offering new symbolic interpretations of their incarceration. Long Bo once remarked, “If I hadn't done these 20 years, maybe I'd have ended up in a different way—maybe I would've overdosed one day and died.” Yupi also believed that if he hadn't been arrested, he might have followed the same path as many others—addicted, infected with HIV, and left to die in obscurity.

In this light, the moral experiences of incarceration fundamentally reshape an inmate's perception of the very institution that imposed suffering. While some former offenders may develop a surprisingly positive view of prison as a refuge that shields them from their own “irresistible impulses,” as Duncan (1996) observed, a more precise interpretation is that prison provides not a better life but a crucial space for moral reflection and action (Crewe and Levins, 2020; Frankl, 2006). It creates a forced opportunity to look inward, confront the self, and begin the arduous work of remaking one's character—a process Michel Foucault (2017) would describe as the becoming of an ethical subject. By transforming suffering into a catalyst for self-reconstruction, this experience reveals a far more complex dynamic than mere punishment, offering a powerful glimpse into the productive and subject-forming capacity of power itself.

“Reflection” typically emerges in the final act of the punishment story. It is the interviewee's spontaneous answer to the question, “What did all of this mean?” after recounting their long incarceration. Unlike the preceding emotional experiences of suffering, endurance, and connection, reflection is not merely a restatement of past events but a fundamental reorganization of meaning—a conscious effort to rebuild one's moral world in retrospect. In this narrative turn, the individual is no longer merely recounting the pain, constraints, and warmth brought by punishment but is actively imbuing these experiences with new ethical significance, integrating them into the meaning-making framework of their present life. This reflective process both continues and transcends the preceding emotional logic. While it shares certain characteristics with what Maruna (2001) terms the “redemption script”—notably, the subject's effort to reconstruct a moral identity through storytelling—its endpoint is not necessarily to “become a good person” or “readjust to society.” Rather, it manifests as a profound reexamination of the moral order itself—an ethical inquiry that moves beyond the simple binary of crime and punishment. In this sense, the “reconstruction” achieved through the narrative is not a submission to institutional goals of reform. Instead, it is a subjective process where the individual, through their own storytelling, redefines the meaning of good and evil, responsibility, and their own existence. Here, the state's proclaimed project of “thought reform” is subjectively transformed and extended through the power of individual narrative.