That's the reality, and to hell with what the class-room bred, degree toting, grant-hustling experts say from their well-funded, air-conditioned offices far removed from the grubby realities of the prisoner's lives (Rideau and Wikberg, 1992: 59). Introduction THE UNITED STATES IMPRISONS MORE PEOPLE THAN ANY OTHER COUNTRY IN THE Western world. Meanwhile, prison is dominated by government funding and conducted by academics or consultants, many of them former employees of the law enforcement establishment (ex-police, correctional, probation, or parole officers), who subscribe to conservative ideologies and have little empathy for prisoners. Much of this managerial research routinely disregards the harm perpetrated by criminal justice processing of individuals arrested, charged, and convicted of crimes (Clear, 1994; Cullen, 1995). If legislators, practitioners, researchers, and scholars are serious about addressing the corrections crisis (e.g., Clear, 1994; Welch, 1996, 1999; Austin and Irwin, 2001), we need to be more honest and creative with respect to the we conduct and the policies we advocate, implement, and evaluate. To promote this objective, this essay introduces what we are calling and reviews the theoretical and historical grounding, current initiatives, and dominant themes of this emerging school and social movement. Theoretical and Historical Grounding To appreciate the context of Convict Criminology, we need to understand the steps taken to arrive at this juncture. Four interrelated movements, factors, and methodologies led to the birth of Convict Criminology: theoretical developments in criminology, the failure of prisons, the authenticity of insider perspectives, and the centrality of ethnography. Theoretical Developments in Criminology: The history of criminological theory consists of a series of reform movements (Vold and Bernard, 1996). As early as the 1920s, biologically based arguments of criminal causation were being replaced by environmental, socioeconomic, and behavioral explanations. Even in the field of radical and critical criminology, there have been a series of divisions (Lynch, 1996; Ross, 1998). Since the 1970s, critical criminology has splintered into complementary perspectives including feminism (e.g., Chesney-Lind, 1991; Daly, 1994; Owen, 1998), postmodernism (e.g., Arrigo, 1998a, 1998b: 109-127; Ferrell, 1998), left realism (e.g., Young and Matthews, 1992), peacemaking (e.g., Pepinsky and Quinney, 1991; Quinney, 1998), and cultural criminology (e.g., Ferrell and Sanders, 1995; Ferrell, 1996). This multiplicity of perspectives suggests that radical/critical criminology has broadened its intellectual endeavor. Although these diverse discourses and metanarratives...open up new co nceptual and political space (Ferrell, 1998: 64), they, too, often remain the intellectual products of the well meaning yet privileged, with only minimal reference and relevance to the victims of the criminal justice machine. Perhaps in the new millennium criminologists and other social scientists may realize that convict voices, in many instances, have been forgotten, marginalized, or simply ignored (see Gaucher, 1998: 2-16). The Failure of Prisons: Many prominent criminologists have discussed the failure of prisons to correct criminal behavior. The differential effects of incarceration are well known. According to Sutherland et al. (1992: 524), some apparently become 'reformed' or 'rehabilitated,' while others become 'confirmed' or 'hardened' criminals. For still others, prison life has no discernible effect on subsequent criminality or noncriminality. Johnson (1996: xi) suggested that, prisoners serve hard time, as they are meant to, but typically learn little of value during their stint behind bars. They adapt to prison in immature and often destructive ways. As a result, they leave prison no better, and sometimes considerably worse, than when they went in. …