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From “Observation Dude” to “An Observational Study”: Gaining Access and Conducting Research Inside a Paramilitary Organization*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Philip Goodman
Philip Goodman
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Avenue Toronto, ON M5S 2J4, [email protected]
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Extract

Although challenges and barriers to researchers' access are common across any number of empirical sites in socio-legal research—as suggested by the very nature of this special issue and the call for papers that generated it—it has been suggested recently that prisons and other institutions of penal confinement provide a particularly troubling case study. For instance, Loïc Wacquant argues that “the ethnography of the prison thus went into eclipse at the very moment when it was most urgently needed on both scientific and political grounds.” Although the causes of the decline as understood by Wacquant transcend problems with access (principally, for Wacquant, a transition from the “maternalist (semi-) welfare state to the paternalist penal state”), access, by all accounts, is an ongoing and significant concern. As Kimberly Jacob Arriola summarizes, “conducting research in correctional settings is extremely difficult. Inmates (and any other institutionalized population for that matter) are considered a special population deserving of additional research protections… Moreover, many correctional administrators may not see research as a priority and not want researchers ‘poking around’ for fear that they may discover something less flattering.”

Of course, one must be careful not to overstate the paucity of research inside penal institutions, especially given that the decline was probably less severe outside the US, and given that the last half dozen or so years have marked somewhat of a renaissance of scholarship on life inside carceral facilities. Also, the partial decline should not be taken as grounds for lionizing those researchers who do gain/have gained access to prisons and jails to carry out socio-legal research.

Type
Problems in Accessing Information: A Collection of Essays
Information
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , December 2011 , pp. 599 - 605
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Law and Society Association 2011

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References

1 Wacquant, Loïc, “The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Ethnography 3, 4 (2002), 385CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Emphasis in original. See also Simon, Jonathan, “The ‘Society of Captives’ in the Era of Hyper-Incarceration,” Theoretical Criminology 4:3 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Wacquant, ibid., 382.

3 Arriola, Kimberly Jacob, “Debunking the Myth of the Safe Haven: Toward a Better Understanding of Intraprison HIV Transmission,” Criminology and Public Policy 5, 1 (2006), 138CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Waldram, James, “Challenges of Prison Ethnography,” Anthropology News 50, 1 (2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 See, e.g., Taylor, Jon Marc, “Diogenes Still Can't Find His Honest Man,” Journal of Prisoners on Prison 18, 1/2 (2009)Google Scholar.

5 See, e.g., Liebling, Alison, “Doing Research in Prison: Breaking the Silence?,” Theoretical Criminology 3, 2 (1999), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Jenness, Valerie et al. ,, “Accomplishing the Difficult but Not Impossible: Collecting Self-Report Data on Inmate-on-Inmate Sexual Assault in Prison,” Criminal Justice Policy Review 21, 1 (2009)Google Scholar.

7 Sparks, Richard, “Out of the ‘Digger’: The Warrior's Honour and the Guilty Observer,” Ethnography 3, 4 (2002), 578CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 See Goodman, Philip, “‘It's Just Black, White, or Hispanic’: An Observational Study of Racializing Moves in California's Segregated Prison Reception Centers,” Law & Society Review 42, 4 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 An example of the former is Sparks, “Out of the ‘Digger.’” An example of the latter is Fleisher, Mark, Warehousing Violence (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1989)Google Scholar.

10 Petersilia, Joan, “Influencing Public Policy: An Embedded Criminologist Reflects on California Prison Reform,” Journal of Experimental Criminology 4 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 543 US 499 (2005). In that decision the Court ruled the proper standard of review for California's practice of racially segregating its prisons was strict scrutiny, but remanded the case to the lower courts to apply the new, heightened, standard.

12 To be fair, CDCR administrators were interested in some research, as they hired as consultants two researchers from Texas who authored what was at the time the only systematic empirical study of racial segregation in contemporary US prisons—a study cited by the Supreme Court in the Johnson decision. See Trulson, Chad and Marquart, James, “The Caged Melting Pot: Toward an Understanding of the Consequences of Desegregation in Prisons,” Law and Society Review 36, 4 (2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Although I have focused here on external factors shaping my access and field research, I would be remiss not to at least mention in passing that a contributing factor was my own desire to complete the project relatively quickly, especially given impending deadlines from my academic department.

14 The consequences of this trade-off extended well beyond the fieldwork phase of the project, as I was encouraged during the process of preparing a manuscript for publication, first by an anonymous reviewer, and later by the journal's editor, to strip the ethnographic label from how I categorized my research.

15 Again, see Sparks, “Out or the ‘Digger.’”