The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography

Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, J. Sloan, Kenneth A. Loparo, Kenneth A. Loparo, J. Sloan, Deborah H. Drake, Rod Earle, Deborah H. Drake, Rod Earle, J. Sloan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137403872
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137403889
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography provides an expansive overview of the challenges presented by qualitative, and particularly ethnographic, enquiry. The chapters reflect upon the means by which ethnographers aim to gain understanding, make sense of what they learn and the way they represent their finished work. The Handbook offers urgent insights relevant to current trends in the growth of imprisonment worldwide. In an era of mass incarceration, human-centric ethnography provides an important counter to quantitative analysis and the audit culture on which prisons are frequently judged.
The Handbook is divided into four parts. Part I ('About Prison Ethnography') assesses methodological, theoretical and pragmatic issues related to the use of ethnographic and qualitative enquiry in prisons. Part II ('Through Prison Ethnography') considers the significance of ethnographic insights in terms of wider social or political concerns. Part III ('Of Prison Ethnography') analyses different aspects of the roles ethnographers take and how they negotiate their research settings. Part IV ('For Prison Ethnography') includes contributions that convincingly extend the value of prison ethnography beyond the prison itself.
Bringing together contributions by some of the world's leading scholars in criminology and prison studies, this authoritative volume maps out new directions for future research. It will be an indispensable resource for practitioners, students, academics and researchers who use qualitative social research methods to further their understanding of prisons.

Part I

About Prison Ethnography

Introduction to Part I

Rod Earle

Part I of this Handbook introduces the complex field of prison ethnography. Collectively, the chapters examine their place in the wider ethnographic landscape and illuminate the particular challenges and triumphs of conducting ethnography in prison and how, and why, some ethnographers ‘do’ prison ethnography.

The first three chapters present distinctive and contrasting perspectives on prison ethnography. In Chapter 1, Martyn Hammersley writes ‘from the outside’, quickly indicating that he has no experience of prison ethnography. However, as many will recognise, and as his ubiquitous presence in the reference section of ethnographic texts attests to, Hammersley is very much ‘an insider’ when it comes to ethnography. He provides a succinct and lucid summary of many of the themes that animate this collection – the role of reflexivity in prison ethnography, the difficulties of rendering an authentic account of prison life and being sensitive to the power-soaked contexts of prison research. Writing with the benefit of long experience, Hammersley strikes a cautionary note, warning prison ethnographers not to ‘over play their hand’ in their enthusiasm for an ‘ethnographic imperative’. The epistemic privilege this assumes can be a poison chalice, warns Hammersley, implicitly establishing a sterile hierarchy of methods that binds thought and action to the vertical at the expense of the horizontal. The three-dimensional research community Hammersley prefers may be a ‘swamp’, but we are all in it together, he insists, and ‘there is no moral high ground’.

In Chapter 2, David Scott argues that the moral compass of prison ethnographers must be brought fully into view. Writing from direct experience of 16 different prisons, Scott declares them to be ‘profoundly immoral places’. Laying his cards firmly on the table as a prison abolitionist, Scott fully reveals his hand. Having briefly outlined what is involved in contemporary abolitionism, he draws explicitly and evocatively from his research journals to provide the kinds of insights that propel ethnographic claims to epistemic privilege. His work with prison chaplains inevitably pulls him towards the moral core of penal practice. He describes prisons as ‘dark places’, ‘graves for the living’, as the title of his chapter puts it. Taking inspiration and direction from Stan Cohen’s (2001) States of Denial, rich in first-hand ethnographic detail, Scott’s chapter could not be more different from Hammersley’s. The moral high ground is staked out and the hierarchy confronted. An abolitionist praxis that testifies against the denial and neutralisation of penal horror is proposed. Prison ethnographers, equipped as they are with privileged knowledge, must ‘name the prison place for what it is – a place structured to deliver violence, pain and suffering’.

In Chapter 3, the ‘moral performance’ of prisons is a theme identified by Alison Liebling and her colleagues at the Cambridge Prisons Research Centre. ‘Moral performance’ offers a sophisticated metric for evaluating what prisons do (Liebling and Arnold, 2004), and few people in the UK have more combined experience of researching prisons than Alison Liebling, Helen Arnold and Christina Straub. This chapter finds firm, if not high, ground in Hammersley’s swamp. The authors do this by revisiting Cohen and Taylor’s famous study from 1972 in the context of their 2010–11 study of HMP Whitemoor. In doing so, they seek to reinvent the dialogue between prison researcher and researched prisoner. Vivid extracts from fieldwork notes illuminate the chapter, as they do in Scott’s, but they are not just the researchers’ notes. Prisoners contribute their perspectives and the work of the Cambridge Dialogue Group rises from the pages, meeting the force of Scott’s argument with its own ‘moral and emotional momentum’. According to the authors, long-term prisoners engaged in dialogue with long-term criminologists promise to become the new criminologists of the future. Two utopian visions, three chapters in!

The collapse of the twentieth century’s largest utopian project, the Soviet Union, forms the backdrop to Laura Piacentini’s contribution in Chapter 4 on researching Russian prisons. Transitions are her theme. Caught up in Russia’s chaotic re-emergence from Soviet collectivity to national singularity, Piacentini cannot help but find her ethnography pulling her ever deeper into Russian penal culture and its people’s orientations to the state and history. Prisons are the thread out of which Piacentini weaves a story that is both personal and ethnographically instructive. With the benefit of 20 years of experience in Russian prison research, she can retrospectively contextualise what it is about ethnography that has animated her career. She speaks of ‘ethnographic mobilisation and immobilisation’ to account for its differential presence in her work as she has moved towards the development of penal policy and practice in the new Russian state. As Russians reimagine their future, the penal structures of the past haunt their new institutions and visions. Piacentini wonders aloud how her research can be reconciled to the pains and urgency that accompany such a process. Just as Max Weber’s experiences of the 1918 German Revolution pushed him to focus on ‘self-clarification’, ‘inner consistency’ and ‘vocation’, so Piacentini turns to ‘integrity’, in method and intent, as the answer to the questions that confront her. ‘Honouring one’s word’ is the key to ethnographic authority she settles on, recognising ethnographers’ responsibility to ethical practice; it also provides her with the means to survive the societal turbulence gripping contemporary Russia.

French penal practice may not have Russia’s fragmenting history and uncertain future to contend with, but Gilles Chantraine and Nicolas Sallée report in Chapter 5 on the way technological innovation in youth custody settings in France both fit into and shape new patterns of control. The close engagement involved in ethnographic research allows them to identify how the introduction of an electronic logbook to record, compile and distribute staff observations of young people in prison generated revealing patterns of compliance, resistance and consternation. Their work highlights the role of the ethnographic in accessing a wider range of interpretive repertoires. Chantraine and Sallée identify the rhetoric of electronic communication as a transformative medium that extends well beyond the simple management of data. Through careful observation and sophisticated theoretical analysis, they note how the conventions of oral conversation between staff become locked into the new digital recordings and are thus radically transformed. In stark contrast to the organic dialogue championed by Liebling, Arnold and Straub, Chantraine and Sallée identify a new trend in communicative control. They call attention to the need for an even wider approach to prison ethnography, which can encompass ‘an ethnography of writing’. Writing themselves against the eclipse of prison ethnography, they demand an inclusive prison ethnography that uses more imaginative ethnographic methods. Drawing from rich new French ethnographic practice (Fassin, 2013) and theoretical innovation across the new social studies of technologies (Latour, 2005), Chantraine and Sallée offer an exemplary case of how prison ethnography brings a novel visibility and intelligibility to the dark places described by Scott.

Getting close to the research subject is an intrinsic part of ethnography, but, in Chapter 6, Ben Crewe and Alice Ievins present a series of challenging examples as to how, in prisons, this can confront ethnographers with particular dilemmas. Taking as a starting point the account of an American journalist sued by a prisoner for misrepresentation and ‘character assassination’, they explore ideas about readership and writing. Compelling accounts of their work with prisoners and in prison draw the contours of moral quandaries they have negotiated, with varying degrees of satisfaction. They go on to ask searching questions about the capacity of researchers to extend empathy to men convicted of sexual offences and about their honesty in reporting feelings less readily ‘owned’ and disclosed than the more conventional ones. Here, the implications of a distinction drawn, tacitly or explicitly, between ‘ordinary decent criminals’ and an ultimate criminal ‘other’, are opened up. It is a conversation waiting to happen, a dialogue that prisoner ethnographers can begin.

The complex theoretical and methodological issues outlined by Hammersley in the opening chapter of this section benefit from his years of immersion in ethnography. The last chapter in Part I, Chapter 7, continues the theme of contrasting diverse perspectives by presenting a thoughtful, reflective account of two ‘green’ prison ethnographers. Jennifer Sloan and Serena Wright comment on their experience of ethnographic prison research as PhD research students, ‘neophytes’ to the world of prison and academic research. Taking inspiration from Jewkes (2012), they focus on the profound experiential impact of prison interiors. Treading a careful line between recognition of the emotional toll involved and the need to avoid the implication of any equivalence to the burdens shouldered by prisoners, Sloan and Wright add to a growing reflexive literature about prison ethnography itself. Many, more experienced prison researchers will recognise their dilemmas. Those new to the field, or considering their options, will benefit from their generosity and candour. Going further than simply sharing their own experiences, the authors present the results of a survey of more experienced prison researchers. This commitment to openness makes a substantial contribution to the kind of scholarly community that prison ethnographers need to thrive.

Max Weber (1968) thought of ecclesiastical institutions as merely burnt-out shells of a once-burning charisma. Prisons exert a kind of morbid charisma that is more continually bruising than ‘once burning’. Nonetheless, it is a force less readily recognised than their simple authority and symbolic presence. As such, prisons exert a powerful magnetic pull on both the popular and the sociological imaginations. Collected in this first part of the Handbook are seven examinations of that attraction. They show prison ethnography as both diverse and disagreeing, a sign of its health and potential. Prisons exist in many more countries than it would be possible to include in this volume, but what drives prison ethnography forward is that it only takes ‘one good case [to] illuminate the working of a social system’ (Gluckman, 1961: 9). Going around and about prison ethnography, the following chapters demonstrate how this is accomplished.

References

Cohen, S. (2001) States of Denial (Cambridge: Polity Press).

Fassin, D. (2013) Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (Polity: Cambridge).

Gluckman, M. (1961) ‘Ethnographic Data in British Social Anthropology’, Sociological Review, 9, 5–17.

Jewkes, Y. (2012) ‘Autoethnography and Emotion as Intellectual Resources: “Doing Prison Research Differently” ’, Qualitative Inquiry, 18, 1, 63–75.

Latour (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Durham: Duke University Press).

Liebling, A., assisted by Arnold, H. (2004) Prisons and Their Moral Performance: A Study of Values, Quality and Prison Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Weber, M. (1968) On Charisma and Institution Building (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

1

Research ‘Inside’ Viewed from ‘Outside’: Reflections on Prison Ethnography

Martyn Hammersley

Introduction

My focus in this chapter is on the methodological implications of the inside/outside distinction for ethnographic research,¹ as illustrated by the critical case of prison ethnography (Jacobs, 1974; Liebling, 1999; Rhodes, 2001). Appropriately enough, in colloquial English, ‘being inside’ is a euphemism for ‘being in prison’, and this acknowledges, amongst other things, the sharp boundary around this type of setting, marking it off from ‘the outside world’ – a feature that is of considerable importance from the point of view of carrying out research and from other perspectives as well. As Rhodes (2004: 8) remarks: ‘prisons create by their very nature sets of opposing and aligned positions.’

More generally, though, the distinction between inside and outside is central to much discussion of ethnography, since its advocates insist on the importance of finding out what goes on inside settings and of understanding the perspectives of insiders, asserting the capacity of ethnography to do this. Outside/inside also connects to the notion of reflexivity, which is often seen as a central feature of ethnography (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). Whilst many meanings have been given to the term ‘reflexivity’ in the literature (Lynch, 2000), the most common one involves the idea of stepping outside of an activity in which one is engaged (in this case research) in order to reflect back upon it. This type of reflexivity is an aspect of the task in which I am engaged here. As an outsider to prison ethnography (I have never done ethnography ‘inside’), my reflexive credentials are no doubt open to question, but I can claim to be an insider to ethnography more generally. And the issues I will address – whilst prompted by reading and thinking about prison ethnography – apply beyond that specific field.

The features of ethnography I will be discussing have an ambiguous character. They can be positive, but they also harbour temptations, dangers and errors, which I will explore. In part, these are linked to a tendency to forget the metaphorical and functional character of the inside/outside distinction (see Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). I will discuss them under two headings: ‘epistemological’ and ‘ethical/political’.

Epistemological issues regarding inside/outside

A starting point here is what might be called the ethnographic imperative; and this, I suggest, underpins concern over the ‘eclipse’ of prison ethnography (Wacquant, 2002a). This imperative asserts that in order to truly understand any social phenomenon, direct contact with it via participant observation is required. This was built into anthropological enquiry for much of the twentieth century. Also, symptomatic of the influence of this imperative is the way in which a famous quotation from Robert Park has been frequently repeated. This quotation, from the 1920s or early 1930s, reads:

Go and sit in the lounges of the luxury hotels and on the doorsteps of the flophouses; sit on the Gold Coast settees and on the slum shakedowns; sit in the Orchestra Hall and in the Star and Garter Burlesk. In short, [ … ] go get the seats of your pants dirty in real research.

(quoted in McKinney, 1966: 71)

In the context of prison research, King (2000: 297–98) provides an echo:

This may sound obvious. But it has to be said. It simply is not possible to do research that will tell you much about prisons without getting out into the field. No amount of theorizing or reading in an office can substitute for the hands-on experience of spending your time in prison.

Integral to what I have called the ethnographic imperative is a claim to epistemic privilege: that ethnography, especially in the form of participant observation, provides superior understanding. For example, it is often argued that direct contact is required if the researcher is to be able to overcome her or his preconceptions and prejudices about the people and places being investigated. Or, it may be suggested that social institutions present misleading facades and that it is only by penetrating those facades that genuine knowledge can be produced: going inside to find out ‘what really goes on’, rather than accepting official accounts or more remote and mediated perspectives. The implication is that any other source of knowledge than ethnography (in the form of participant observation) is defective, or at least very much second class. Underpinning this is the idea that closeness, or involvement in a setting, provides access to data that cannot be obtained in any other way and offers genuine understanding of people and places. Thus, in the context of his study of Wellingborough prison, Crewe (2009: 3) refers to ethnography as ‘an approach that can pierce the skin of an institution, penetrate official descriptions and show the interconnections between apparently...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• General Introduction: What Ethnography Tells Us about Prisons and What Prisons Tell Us about Ethnography
• Part I: About Prison Ethnography
• Part II: Through Prison Ethnography
• Part III: Of Prison Ethnography
• Part IV: For Prison Ethnography
• Index