Situating the Self in Prison Research: Power, Identity and Epistemology

Abstract

From the middle of the twentieth century onwards, ethnographic methods have had a central influence on sociological research in prisons (Clemmer, 1940; Sykes, 1958; Ward and Kassebaum, 1965; Giallombardo, 1966). It is a tradition that continues to make a significant contribution to the sociological understanding of imprisonment in jurisdictions across the globe, in spite of concerns that, in an age of mass incarceration, ethnographic research has become relatively marginalised since its mid-century ‘golden age’ (Wacquant, 2002). The contribution that participant observation has made to the understanding of imprisonment and prison institutions is clear. However, as Jewkes (2012) has observed, ethnographies of prison life have tended to avoid acknowledging the emotionality and autoethnographic dimensions of the participant observation on which they rest. Criminology, she suggests, has not been receptive to accounts of the emotional subtext of field research. Although a reflexive tradition is well established and vigorous in many fields of contemporary ethnographic research (see, inter alia, Van Maanen, 1995; Emerson et al., 2001; Atkinson et al., 2003; Davies, 2008), in written ethnographies of prison life, the researcher often all but disappears, confined to methodological footnotes and appendices and seldom visible or acknowledged in the analysis proper. This evasion of self and emotion in written accounts of prison research defies the ineluctably embodied and — despite its realist and positivist origins — subjective character of ethnographic methods.