Researching Russian prisons: a consideration of new and established methodologies in prison research

Abstract

This comment was said to me by a person whom I met on a flight to Russia in 2003. I was going to Russia to conduct five weeks of prison research. My first foray into Russian prisons lasted six weeks in 1998, followed by five months’ fieldwork in 1999. Five weeks, therefore, did not faze me. That is, until I attempted to answer the question above. While it was obvious to me why I ‘do prison research’ and ‘how I do it’, my pleasant co-passenger insisted that doing prison research is ‘crazy’ because ‘the majority of people do not care about prisoners or prison’. Prisons, she said, are best avoided. At that moment, I reflected yet again on why one would venture into what Cohen and Taylor describe as ‘the cold and emotional world of the prison’ (1981: 70). Yet, it is the above comment that captures perfectly the common reaction: stay away from this ‘site of intractable conflict’ (Sparks 2002: 556). 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 focusing on how researchers access the professional organization of the prison or how penal policy-making has ‘reinvented the wheel’ in terms of reducing recidivism (see Carlen 2005: 422 for a discussion), this chapter will instead survey a range of prototypical prison scholarship and explore the problems, the pitfalls, the complexities and the emotional intricacies that can surface. Drawing on my own experience of nearly 10 years of prison research in Russia the chapter offers new insights into doing prison research by focusing attention on the following. First,the chapter engages 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 recognizing 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. Secondly, 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 learnt from 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 describes the difficulties in this approach and the existential, reflexive and genderbased conundrums that arise when prison research is conducted outside one’s familiar cultural, social and personal terrain.