Judicial narratives: their function and their current crisis

Abstract

In this paper the Authors first address the penal crisis of late modernity studying the transformation of narratives of crime. The nature of crime narratives is investigated integrating René Girard’s contribution about “texts of persecution” with psychosociological approaches about punitive society and about displacement of collective guilt upon a scapegoat. Secondly, the Authors analyse the production of narratives via the penal process, showing how the production of plots constitutes the key moment of the construction of a “truth” which allows the infliction of a punishment upon a criminal, who, on his part, becomes the “signifier” of the transgression and symbolises for the collectivity the fate of whoever breaks the criminal law. Recently, however, the centrality of processual narratives is in crisis: the Authors note that society has accorded more privilege to other kinds of narratives, different from the institutional ones (criminal trial in the courts), and centered around the world of media (mainly Internet and TV).  Such “new” forms of narratives are constituted more via an integration of written text and images than traditional ones, and are produced very fastly after a crime has been committed: in such way, the most important trials are anticipated and somehow decided outside their institutional contexts.