Prison Research Research Articles

Doing Qualitative Research in a Controlled Site: Challenges, Lessons, and Strategies

This paper reflects on the process of undertaking qualitative research with incarcerated individuals and prison staff in selected Ghana prisons. The challenges encountered during the planning, approval, and fieldwork stages, as well as measures adopted to address these challenges, have been discussed. The paper aims to serve as a guide to novel prison researchers in the sub-Saharan African context, given that the majority of studies on challenges and approaches to conducting prison research have come from jurisdictions outside the region. To this end, given the unique nature of the prison governance system in Ghana and other sub-Saharan African countries, this paper contributes to filling a knowledge gap in qualitative prison research.

Community-engaged prison-based research in a pandemic: the efficacy of summative content analysis for understanding prison culture and climate

ABSTRACT The challenges presented by COVID-19 in prison settings highlight the need for research that captures the lived experiences and needs of incarcerated individuals. Primary data collection among people living in prison during the global pandemic, however, presents unfamiliar obstacles that require innovation and invite opportunities to adopt methods not traditional in criminal-legal research. This manuscript details the application of summative content analysis to consider incarcerated persons’ perceptions of institutional culture and climate. This research was conducted as part of the Prison Research and Innovation Initiative (PRII). A written open-ended questionnaire yielded data from 84 individuals incarcerated in a medium-security institution in the Midwest region of the United States. The results highlight several prominent themes in prison culture and climate and endorse the use of open-ended questionnaires analyzed with summative content analysis as a viable approach to collecting and examining high-quality data from people living in prison. The results from this work also underscore the efficacy of this method as a part of community-engaged research in prison settings.

Incarcerated Bodies – Embodied Autoethnography in Prison

Prison is a study field in which everyone – inmates, guards, and prison researchers – experiences powerful sensory stimuli comprised of sounds, sights, and smells in a crowded, closed space. Yet traditional academic research has socialized researchers to “wash away” their physical and emotional feelings for fear they would jeopardize the scientific nature and validity of their studies. Nevertheless, at times in a prison setting, the researchers’ bodies are the only tool that enables them to document what goes on; so much so that ignoring their bodies and emotions leads to a loss of valuable information. Using embodied autoethnography (EA), I have examined bodily experiences in prison as reflected in the staff's conversations about the prisoners, how the prisoners speak of themselves, and the researcher's own prison experience while facilitating theater and study groups in an Israeli prison. I contend that the staff treats the prisoners' bodies as one would a messy body, which then becomes a metonymy for the prisoners' criminal personality. Although the prisoners internalize this standpoint, they continuously undermine it by boasting bodies that are both aesthetic and tidy. In conclusion, I claim that prison inmates are attentive to the self-body of all those with whom they interact. They use performance and physical gestures to build relationships while expressing vulnerability and empathy. Prisoners forge mutual emotional ties with researchers they identify as having a psychic deadness and with whom they are able to engage in a process of emotional bartering. The study sheds light on the incarceration experience and effects of human bodies in prison, emphasizing the importance of the use of qualitative methodologies that give voice to body, senses, and emotions.

Assessing incarcerated women\u2019s physical and mental health status and needs in a Swiss prison: a cross-sectional study

BackgroundWomen make up 5% of the European prison population on average. Almost invisible in prison and health research, and suffering the stigma associated with female offending, incarcerated women are often forgotten, and their specific healthcare needs remain much ignored. Combining face-to-face survey interviews and medical chart data, we aim to assess the health status, healthcare needs, and access to preventive medicine of women incarcerated in Switzerland.ResultsSixty incarcerated adult women participated in a cross-sectional study to assess their life and incarceration histories, physical and mental health problems, medication, and use of medical services. Eligibility criteria were (a) an incarceration of at least four weeks and (b) the ability to provide written informed consent. Exclusion criteria were psychiatric instability and insufficient language competence.Women’s average age was 34.3 years old (SD = 9.8); 45.0% of them were born in Switzerland, 33.3% in Europe and 15.0% on the African continent. Overall, 61.7% of women self-reported physical or mental health problems and 13.3% indicated they were once diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection. Further, 78.3% of women were active cigarette smokers; more than one in three women reported alcohol use problems and almost one in two women had used at least one illicit drug in the year before incarceration. Depression and perceived stress scores were above clinical cut-off points for more than half of interviewed women. When asked how they rated their health, 68.3% of women felt it had worsened since incarceration. All but four women had accessed prison medical services; however, our study does not indicate whether women’s use of healthcare was indeed adequate to their needs.ConclusionsThis study demonstrated incarcerated women’s poor health and health-risk behaviours. Structural changes and gender-responsive health promotion interventions have the potential to improve the health of incarcerated women and help them return to the community in better health.

Investigar en la cárcel: sentires alrededor de intentos de cierre

I began my research in prisons in 2007 and, since then, I tried several times to close this door. Inspired by auto ethnography method, I share an intimate way of writing that gives an account on investigation processes, emotions, experiences, questionings about my life around prison. Within all my attempts to close, until today, none has been conclusive. From Lima to Mexico City, from my Master to my actual research, this paper follows a chronological line and crosses experiences, emotions and considerations on time in investigation and the challenges that the pandemic situation implies.

Volunteering for Research in Prison: Issues of Access, Rapport and Ethics and Emotions During Ethnography

Gaining access to formal institutions can be problematic for ethnographers. This is especially so when it comes to prisons where people are incarcerated by the state against their will for various crimes committed by them. Here, in such highly controlled environments, some authors have pointed out the lack of openness of correctional facilities to inquiry and the limited cooperation forthcoming from the various authorities that oversee them. Accordingly, this article examines the difficult processes undertaken to negotiate access to a high-security prison in Spain, and then maintain his role there for a 2-year period as a volunteer sports educator in order to explore the multiple meanings given to sport and physical activity in the prison setting by the prisoners, educational staff and the guards. The emotional costs and ethical dilemmas of sustaining working relationships with these different groups over time in order to achieve specific research goals are highlighted and reflections for future studies of prison life are offered.

Shifting Subjectivities and Shifting Teaching: Participatory Action Research in Prison

AbstractResearch focused on minoritized communities has predominantly been conducted by individuals associated with universities who have little connection to or investment in these communities beyond their research agenda. Oftentimes, this research benefits the researcher more than the community. This study of a peer‐taught, prison‐based, adult language, and literacy program challenged traditional research paradigms through the implementation of participatory action research (PAR). Informed by PAR epistemologies, the research team, composed of the incarcerated peer‐instructors and a university volunteer, employed qualitative methodologies over an 18‐month period to better understand how the program was experienced by its different members in relation to classroom practices and policies. We examine how PAR provided a reflexive space for us to examine our shifting subjectivities as members and researchers in the program while also challenging our understandings of the experiences of program members. Additionally, this study calls for a broader consideration of how change is defined.

Participatory Theater as Fieldwork in Chinese Prisons: A Research Note

This methodological reflection is based on the author's own experience taking part in participatory theater projects in mainland Chinese prisons over the past 5 years. This article demonstrates how the author's participation in prison theater projects secured otherwise unattainable research access by forming collaborations with various organizations. Participatory theater workshops also offered the space for sustaining long-term rapport. This research note discusses why trusting relationships are the most important guarantee to obtaining valid data in Chinese prison research. The findings contribute to understanding methodological challenges and innovations of conducting fieldwork in criminal justice systems with no formal research access channels.

Same problems, different concepts and language: What happens when prison climate research goes on a journey?

Despite the fact that they face the same problems, prison legislation differs between England and Germany. So do concepts and language. Can prison quality research travel under these circumstances? Are research questions and methodologies transferable from one legal culture into another? By using the example of a joint research project designed to transfer prison climate research from England and establish it in Germany and Switzerland we respond to the challenges of transferability and translatability. After examining the divergent legal cultures in England and Germany we present a prison climate research methodology developed by the Cambridge Prisons Research Centre (PRC). We then delineate the preparation, implementation and outcome of a pretest designed to show whether this cross-cultural research project can work. The concept of moral performance, and the methodology, seem to travel well while things are more complicated when it comes to translation.

Prison Theatre and an Embodied Aesthetics of Liberation: Exploring the Potentials and Limits

Prison theatre practitioners and scholars often describe the sense of imaginative freedom or “escape” that theatre and drama can facilitate for incarcerated actors, in contrast to the strict regimes of the institution. Despite this, the concept of freedom or liberation is rarely interrogated, being presented instead as a given—a natural by-product of creative practice. Drawing from John Dewey’s (1934) pragmatist aesthetics and the liberatory pedagogies of Bell Hooks (2000) and Paulo Freire (1996), I propose an embodied aesthetics of liberation in prison theatre that adds depth and complexity to claims for freedom through creativity. Reflecting on over twenty years of prison theatre practice and research, I propose that the initial “acts of escape” performed through engaging the imagination are merely the first threshold toward more meaningful forms of freedom. I frame these as the following three intersecting domains: “Acts of unbinding”, which represents the personal liberation afforded by experiences with theatre in prison; “acts of love”, which expresses how the theatre ensemble might represent a “beloved community” (hooks); and “acts of liberation”, which articulates how these experiences of self-and-world creation may ripple out to impact audiences and communities. An aesthetics of liberation in prison theatre can, therefore, be conceived as an embodied movement towards personal and social renewal; an approach that deepens our understanding of its oft-cited humanising potential, and its limits.

Prison in Iran: A Known UnknownN.R.Anaraki. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (2021) 117pp. €106.99hb; €85.99e‐book ISBN 978‐3‐030‐57169‐6; 978‐3‐030‐57169‐9

<i>Prison in Iran: A Known Unknown</i>N.R.Anaraki. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (2021) 117pp. €106.99hb; €85.99e‐book ISBN 978‐3‐030‐57169‐6; 978‐3‐030‐57169‐9

Prison research: a bioethics or an ethics issue?

The hypothesis of reducing aggressiveness through transcranial direct current stimulation was recently tested on a cohort of inmates in Spain. The experiment, including 1.5 mA electric shocks, was an external research initiative that received the initial acquiescence of the carceral system. An alarm was raised at the time the research was published, encouraging the directorate of prisons to stop the ongoing replication of the experiment. Nevertheless, no (bio)ethics committee, in the universities or among bioethics experts, has questioned the research. In this think piece, we aim to again discuss some ethical approaches to these clinical interventions on crime. After its positivistic period, the field of criminology has been questioning the simple psychobiological approach to crime because of the reductionistic view of this phenomenon and its harmful consequences. Thus, we address academic experimentation under prison governance and the “re” roles of prisons. We argue that the minor disadvantages of such research, if performed with consent, could be positive if the research can minimize the harmfulness of prison itself; thus, penitentiary treatment and science should go together. Prison administrations, in addition to their duty to protect the individuals under their control from ethically biased research, must promote reintegration. We conclude that human rights are over criminal policy and science and that ethics are over narrower bioethics.

Politics, Research Design, and the ‘Architecture’ of Criminal Careers Studies

Abstract Criminal careers research is one of the bedrocks—if not the bedrock—of criminology. It remains a key focal point of criminological research and has embraced ideas and theories from sociology, psychology, psychiatry and urban and community studies. Despite the widening of the landscape of what might be termed ‘the criminological enterprise’ (to include victimology, prisons research, punishment, deterrence and environmental criminology), criminal careers (now differentiated into studies of onset, persistence and desistance) remains a key plank of criminology. This article critiques the research design of longitudinal studies of criminal careers, arguing that a key explanatory factor has been consistently overlooked in criminal careers research due, in part, to the research design of such studies. In focussing on the role of politically motivated changes to economic policies and the restructuring of the industrial base this produced, I empirically relate individual offending careers to politics in ways very few have done before. The article touches upon a series of suggestions for how empirical studies of criminal careers might be improved.

A New Approach for Researching Victims: The ‘Strength-Growth-Resilience’ Framework

Abstract This paper proposes a new framework for researching victims that blends appreciative inquiry methods used by prison researchers with narrative interview methods used by desistance researchers to investigate victim ‘strength-growth-resilience’. Alongside established victimological concerns with the extent, distribution and treatment of crime victims, this framework offers an alternative lens that focuses on victim agency, identity and transformation. Building on the emancipatory project of feminist victimology, narrative and cultural criminology and an emerging narrative victimology the framework aims to provide a new conceptual reference point for victimological research. The article’s objectives are to demonstrate that this framework delivers a theoretically, empirically and ethically robust approach for exploring the mechanisms by which victims become resilient, and can even flourish, in the aftermath of criminal harm.

(Dis)trusted outsiders: conducting ethnographic research on prison settings

This article aims to contribute to the growing body of literature that critically reflects on the practical, ethical and relational challenges raised by conducting research in prison. Basing our work on three different studies developed in Portuguese prison settings, we develop an intersectional understanding of building (dis)trust in prison settings by reflecting upon researchers’ characteristics and relational dynamics with people in the field, whether they are professionals or prisoners.

Research on the Connection Between Gambling and Crime in Hungary – The Third SOGS Prison Research in a 10-Year Perspective

Judit Tessényi and Gergely Farkas In our research we examined the connection between gambling and crime with 175 prisoners before going to prison. The main topics were gaming habits and demographic attitudes. For our research we used tests to find out the right answer. The actual habits are based on the results of the previous test between 2009 and 2014.

“It’s Us Doing It!” The Power of Participatory Action Research in Prison: A Contradiction in Terms? – Phase 1

We describe and reflect upon the process of setting up participatory action research (PAR) with a group of men resident on a personality assessment and treatment service in a medium security prison for male offenders. The service is part of the national offender personality disorder (OPD) pathway, a joint initiative between the National Health Service England and Her Majesty’s Prison & Probation Service set up in 2011. Its aim was to provide a pathway of services for offenders, likely to be diagnosed with a personality disorder, to reduce risk of re-offending and improve psychological health and wellbeing. Consistent with PAR principles, prisoners were trained as co-researchers with the aim of co-producing new knowledge and improving their community. To our knowledge, this is the first PAR project conducted within the OPD pathway. We focus here on initial stages of research design and development. By sharing our experiences, we contribute to the literature on co-production research highlighting key benefits and challenges of PAR in this setting. Key learnings such as the importance of obtaining organizational support, taking time for establishing trust, relationship-building and research training are discussed.

Not-so-special forces? Revisiting the “veteran effect” in the context of prison research

PurposePrior studies of incarcerated military veterans center on the notion that they are fundamentally different from non-veterans in terms of criminogenic risk. Some scholars have argued that prior military service is a liability in terms of institutional adjustment and may increase the likelihood of experiencing negative outcomes; others have posited that it might serve as an asset and subsequently work to buffer the pains of imprisonment. MethodsOur study contributes to this burgeoning body of research by employing a series of survival analyses to explore the possibility of a “veteran effect” among a sample of veteran and non-veteran offenders in the state of Minnesota. ResultsDespite statistically significant (albeit modest) differences between veterans and non-veterans in the prevalence of theoretically relevant variables, such as traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, we observed no differences between the two groups regarding the likelihood of experiencing various metrics of institutional adjustment and recidivism. ConclusionsOur findings stand in contrast to those of previous studies on incarcerated veterans and call into question the theoretical assumptions (and the subsequent criminal justice policy on which those assumptions are based) regarding the effects of prior military experience on prison (mal)adjustment.

Female Imprisonment: An Ethnography of Everyday Life in ConfinementC.Frois. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (2017) 231pp. £109.99hb ISBN 978‐3‐319‐63684‐9

Female Imprisonment: An Ethnography of Everyday Life in ConfinementC.Frois. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan (2017) 231pp. £109.99hb ISBN 978‐3‐319‐63684‐9

Commentary: Assessing the Global Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Prison Populations

ABSTRACT The author directs the World Prison Research Programme at the Institute for Crime & Justice Policy Research, based at Birkbeck (University of London). The programme’s research team monitors trends in world prison populations and examines the causes and the consequences of rising levels of imprisonment. A core component of the programme involves compiling and hosting the World Prison Brief, an online database providing free access to information about prison systems throughout the world. This Commentary revisits key findings from the Programme’s ongoing work on prison population growth and its links to prison overcrowding and poor standards of prison healthcare. Within this context, some of the main impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on prison systems worldwide will be discussed, with a focus on measures taken to reduce prison population sizes and restrictions put in place in prison regimes (including suspending social and other visits to prisons, home or work leave for prisoners, and related restrictions) to help control spread of the virus. Compensatory measures introduced to lessen the adverse effects of greater isolation and reduced contact with the outside world are discussed. It is argued that the pandemic has revealed an unprecedented need for a more health-informed approach to penal reform.