Crime-narrative complex: The romanticisation and misuse of lived experience in criminal justice

This reflexive essay introduces the Crime–Narrative Complex (CNC), a descriptive and analytical concept for understanding how lived experience stories of crime, punishment, trauma, and desistance become curated, circulated, and commodified across criminal justice, reform, academic, and media environments. Drawing on desistance theory, narrative criminology, and reflexive theorising informed by lived experience, the article examines how institutional and digital platform cultures shape narrative recognition by privileging particular forms of storytelling. The CNC highlights how narratives of redemption, resilience, trauma, accountability, and structural critique can become stabilised through organisational agendas, digital visibility, and professional storytelling economies. Rather than prescribing a singular moral grammar, the article examines how lived experience narratives are shaped through institutional demands for coherence, authenticity, and public intelligibility. In doing so, the CNC offers a conceptual vocabulary for analysing the political economy of contemporary crime storytelling and the conditions under which particular narratives become publicly credible, professionally valuable, and widely circulated.