Handle with Care: New and Established Methodologies in Prison Research

Abstract

Over the last ten years there has been a notable increase in scholarly accounts of doing criminological research. While prison research testimonies provide rich accounts and offer comprehensive guidance as regards the process of acquiring penal knowledge and the often-daunting experience of ‘being inside’, such testimonials are ‘fixed’ geographically to Western cultures and English-speaking societies. Rather than focus on how researchers access the professional organisation of the prison, or how penal policy making has ‘reinvented the wheel’ in terms of reducing recidivism (see Carlen, 2005: 422 for a discussion), the chapter will instead survey a range of prototypical prison scholarship and explore the problems and pitfalls, the complexities and emotional intricacies that can surface. Drawing on my own experience of nearly 10 years prison research in Russia the chapter will offer new insights into doing prison research by focusing attention on the following. First, the chapter will engage with a discussion of some of the issues to think about before prisons are reached. In academic discussions of doing social research in Western societies, the importance of being reflexive is often acknowledged with attention focused on recognising the social location of the researcher, as well as the ways in which our emotional responses to respondents shape the interpretive account. However, few prison research methods offer concrete ways of doing this. Second, the chapter explores some recent experiences of building reflexivity into what researchers do when they are in the thick of prison research. In doing so, the chapter highlights the limitations of Western research and asks whether the competencies, skills and methodological approaches that can be learned from prototypical prison research conducted in Western localities are useful or, indeed, relevant in non-Western societies. I discuss here the process of acquiring penal knowledge based on a criminology of emotional attentiveness that fuses reflexivity with cultural anthropology to create a distinctive methodological approach. Finally, the chapter will describe the difficulties in the approach and the existential, reflexive and gender-based conundrums that arise when prison research is conducted outside of one’s familiar cultural, social and personal terrain.