Over the past few decades, there has been a remarkable rise in the number of people who speak publicly about their experience of crime. These personal accounts used to be confined to private or professional settings—the police station, the courtroom, a helpline or in a counselor’s office—but today bookshops heave with autobiographies by prisoners, criminals, police and barristers; streaming platforms like Netflix and YouTube host hours of interviews with serial killers, death row residents, vigilantes and gang members; true-crime podcasts like Criminal often feature episodes focusing entirely on one person’s narrative, and some offenders even live-stream their crimes. British criminologist Jennifer Fleetwood examines a number of well-known “crimes” that are known to us via a public, first-person account to try to make sense of the social, political and cultural consequences that this confessional impulse has on our lives.