Abstract
This chapter reflects on the ways in which traditional mixed-method research designs can capture the spirit of criminological Verstehen and the ethnographic method. Experiences are offered to illustrate successes and failures in attempts to incorporate the ethnographic lens in prison and reentry-based research. Challenges are raised in incorporating elements of ethnography in traditional mixed-method designs including maintaining boundaries while listening to and treating people with respect as human beings, struggles with prison security issues and logistics, research ethics, developing trust as an outsider, and the difficulties in measuring phenomenological experience through the traditional research process. The importance of incorporating methodological creativity to employ ethnography-infused mixed-method research designs to ensure that the human element of crime and justice research is not lost in the distance that is created by jailhouse criminology is discussed.
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- 1.
In my first year as an assistant professor, I conducted a study that allowed me to interview my grandma and all of her left-wing activist friends. This was one of my early attempts to conduct research that captured the experiences of subjects that were grounded in my own subjective knowledge of the subjects. My grandma, her friends, and this habit of generating research from my own lived experiences have been a major influence in my attempts to incorporate the spirit of ethnography in my work. The results of this study and a subsequent study conducted on right-wing elderly activists were published in Kinney and Helfgott (2000) and Kinney and Helfgott (2004).
- 2.
The prisoners in my study were diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder and housed in medium- and maximum-security prisons. One had kidnapped a woman in the middle of winter, raped her, tied her to a chair, and set her on fire while alive, another had stabbed a man 67 times, one had tortured and murdered two people, and another had a swastika tattooed onto his forehead, to give just a few examples. I even had one subject who had tortured and murdered two people who told me that, if given the opportunity, he would choose to have brain surgery to fix him because if he were set free, he would kill again and would have no problem raping and murdering me.
- 3.
While it is beyond the focus of this study to elaborate on the many experiences I had while collecting data in prisons, it is impossible to ignore and, central to the spirit of ethnography, to acknowledge how much these experiences have shaped my research. For example, the first day I entered the maximum-security prison where I conducted my dissertation research, I dressed professionally in a skirt and heels. I was sternly reminded of my training on safety and contraband by the officer at the front door. I was escorted by the prison psychologist through cell blocks to the area I was designated to conduct my research interviews which can only be described as a dungeon in the sky. I had to be locked in when I had to use the bathroom and was given an emergency number I was to call on a phone with a red button. To this day I can remember the clanging of the doors, the cold smell, the hollers and sounds, the psychologist who told me stories about the recent Camp Hill prison riots being worse than he had seen in Vietnam, and the naked overweight man inside the last cell on the left who stuck his penis out of the cell bars as I walked by, and how strange it was that the first man I interviewed was so strangely different than the file I had read about him torturing, raping, and setting a woman on fire. I went home that night and made the mistake of calling my mom who then told me, “You will not go back into that prison!” I of course had to go back into the prison since it had taken me an entire year to obtain access, but I was shaken enough to call the psychologist I was working with to ask him if it would be possible to be in a different room where I was not alone and did not have to walk through that particular cell block. He then informed me that when I came in the next day, I should dress in the largest coat and bulkiest clothing I could find and he would find a room for me in the mental health unit. While I have become much more accustomed to all that comes with conducting research in the prison setting over the years, the subjective experience of the researcher as he/she moves through the process of navigating these and other criminal justice contexts cannot be underestimated in terms of the impact on research and the researcher role.
- 4.
This homemade “electric chair” traveled with me to Seattle University and to this day sits in my office. When people notice it, it is a powerful symbolic reminder of the reality of capital punishment and the execution process. The use of physical artifacts such as this is yet another way to invoke attention to the realities of the subjects of criminological and criminal justice research.
- 5.
This was a citywide project where artists could submit proposals to be awarded the materials to create a pig. The program I facilitated—The Creative Expressions Project partnered with local artist Kathleen McHugh to apply for the project and received an award. This required considerable negotiation with prison administration and staff to bring a giant Trojan-horse sized pig (that was hollow enough to house a person inside) into the prison facility (For the final product, see: http://www.pigsonparade.org/HogHeaven/PigFinder/ and is featured in the book Pigs on Parade (Pike Place Market Foundation, 2001).
- 6.
In case there is any question that I was violating the well-established rule “anything that goes in the prison must come out and anything in the prison must stay in,” the prisoners had authorization from prison administration/staff to give me these items made in the prison hobby shop. During this time in the 1990s, there was an active prison hobby shop, and prisoners were able to sell and give items they made to their families, volunteers, and correctional staff.
- 7.
I focus here on work I have done in corrections and reentry ; however, I have incorporated the spirit of the ethnographic lens in all of my research including research evaluations of law enforcement training and community-police initiatives including qualitative methods to capture the more nuanced responses of subjects to supplement traditional survey methods (Helfgott, Atherley, et al., 2015; Helfgott, Conn-Johnson, & Wood, 2015; Helfgott & Parkin, 2017; Helfgott, Strah, Pollock, Atherley, & Vinson, 2018; Parkin, Helfgott, Collins, Messelu, & Krappen, 2015), in research on the experiences of women criminal justice professionals (Gunnison & Helfgott, 2018; Parkin, Helfgott, Collins, Messelu, & Krappen, 2018; Helfgott et al, 2018), and incorporating narratives and analysis of manifestos in my work on psychopathy (Helfgott, 2004) and copycat crime (Helfgott, 2014)
- 8.
This occurred at a very intense time in Washington State in the mid-1990s just after the passing of the Community Protection Act of 1990 enacting civil commitment for sexually violent predators and sex offender registration and the Persistent Offender Accountability Act of 1993 (aka “Three Strikes”).
- 9.
- 10.
At one point during the three years of this program, Howard Zehr, widely considered the founding father of restorative justice whose work at Graterford Prison in Pennsylvania was in part the inspiration for the program, came to Seattle to visit and speak with the participants of the program. This was yet another example of a reflexive relationship between the research and subjects in an attempt to introduce the subjects of the study to the scholarly origins of the principles of restorative justice at the heart of the program and research endeavor.
- 11.
See, including TED Talks, the production of the IF Project Documentary (Horan, 2016) featured on NBC News (Yohannes, 2016) and has been replicated in correctional facilities and schools around the country (Guerzon, 2014; Yohannes, 2016) in Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Kentucky, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia (Bogucki, 2017).
- 12.
This work is currently underway. Results will be reported in a subsequent paper entitled If Someone Would Have Showed Me: Identifying Pivotal Points in Pathways to Crime and Incarceration Through Prisoner Self-Narratives (Helfgott, Gunnison, Collins, & Rice, 2017). IF Project narrative responses of juveniles will also be analyzed for a subsequent paper.
- 13.
This is a multi-year Bureau of Justice Assistance-funded study conducted by me and Elaine Gunnison evaluating the IF Project Seattle Women’s Reentry.
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Helfgott, J.B. (2018). Searching for Glimmers of Ethnography in Jailhouse Criminology. In: Rice, S., Maltz, M. (eds) Doing Ethnography in Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96316-7_17
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