Abstract
This remark from a prisoner at HMP Whitemoor, England, expresses what we explore in this article: the extent to which relationships … constitute both ‘the core of ethnographic fieldwork’ (Agar, 1980: 53) and the quality of prison life.
There’s no love in the concrete. It’s almost … at times you feel like even the building despises people in here.
(Prisoner, in Liebling et al., 2012)
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Further reading
Liebling, A. (2015) ‘Description at the Edge? I-It and I-Thou Relations and Action in Research’, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy. Vol. 4, No. 1 18–32.
Liebling, A. (1999) ‘Doing Prison Research: Breaking the Silence?’ Theoretical Criminology, 3(2), 147–73.
Liebling, A. and Costa, J. (2016) ‘Being Human as a Method and Research Finding in Social Science’, in Coffman, D. (ed) Festschrift for Jonathan Steinberg (London: Palgrave Macmillan).
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© 2015 Alison Liebling, Helen Arnold and Christina Straub
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Liebling, A., Arnold, H., Straub, C. (2015). Prisons Research beyond the Conventional: Dialogue, ‘Creating Miracles’ and Staying Sane in a Maximum-Security Prison. In: Drake, D.H., Earle, R., Sloan, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403889_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137403889_4
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