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

This article examines how punishment is reinterpreted through retrospective prison narratives of former heroin dealers in China. Drawing on life-history interviews, the analysis identifies four interrelated narrative stages—suffering, endurance, affection, and reflection—that emerged inductively from how participants recounted their imprisonment. Each stage reveals a distinct mode of emotional and moral negotiation: from enduring physical and moral pain, to learning to submit and cope, to forming affective bonds that humanize control, and finally to reinterpreting punishment as part of a broader moral order. Together, these narratives show that punishment does not end with release but continues through memory, storytelling, and ethical reflection. Rather than a linear path of reform, punishment operates as a delayed, affective, and moral process, whose meaning is continually reshaped by emotional fissures and retrospective storytelling. Grounded in the Chinese penal context, this study contributes an integrated framework that links narrative structure to emotional drivers, demonstrating how punishment endures as a continuing moral process through the reconfiguration of meaning over time.