[John P.] McKendy performs discourse analysis on the stories of the men, identifying the ways they interrupt themselves to cut off stories of their own trauma or other exculpatory factors to insert the CSC-approved rhetoric of guilt and choice. He suggests that these demands may impede the desired rehabilitation, as it forces men's experiences into contours of shame, culpability, and "badness" that might prevent them from coming to terms with their harm in healthy ways. Even their speech has been colonized and infiltrated, and in turn they lose access to the language to name themselves, their own stories, and their own lives.

[...]

The fiction of crime produces the fiction of a criminal, which in turn produces the fiction of prisons as a place for bad people, which then demands that those inside agree with their own categorization: to be criminalized is to be forced to agree that you are a criminal.

— Abolitionist Intimacies by El Jones (Page 120 - 121)