Constructing crime, enacting morality: emotion, crime and anti-social behaviour in an inner-city community

Research into emotion, crime and anti-social behaviour has lacked psychological input and rarely considered the multi-directional associations between emotion, crime and morality. We present a study analysing audio recordings of two community groups meeting in a deprived inner city area with high rates of crime, using conversation analytic and discursive psychological techniques to conduct an affective-textual analysis that draws out aspects of participants’ moral reasoning and identifies its emotional dimensions. Moral reasoning around crime and ASB took three forms (invoking moral categories, developing moral hierarchies, invoking vulnerable others), and was bound up with a wide range of emotional enactments and emotion displays. Findings are discussed in relation to contemporary government policy and possible future research.