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Researching Imprisoned Persons: Views from Spain and Latin America
Abstract
Empirical research in criminology poses many challenges, as the present book attests. This is especially true when researching vulnerable populations such as the group addressed in this chapter: imprisoned persons. Carrying out studies with imprisoned persons has its own set of difficulties due to the context in which research is developed—the prison—and the vulnerabilities of the studied population—the prisoners—, who usually come from disadvantaged backgrounds and are subjected to the power of prison authorities. In this chapter, we use our experience conducting fieldwork inside prisons, mainly in Spain, but also in some countries of Latin America such as Brazil, El Salvador and Mexico, to reflect upon the specific challenges and ethical dilemmas of researching imprisoned persons. First, we address the difficulties of gaining access to prisons and the main obstacles we may find when dealing with the different gatekeepers and a distrustful study population. Secondly, methodological challenges are explored, with a specific focus on conducting surveys and interviews with inmates. The third section discusses the ethical and emotional aspects of prison research. The chapter concludes by reflecting upon the lessons learned from conducting research with imprisoned persons inside prisons.
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Foreigners are overrepresented in most Western European prisons, including Spain. For this reason, there has been a growing interest in studying the conditions of detention for foreigners in European prisons and granting that international standards on equal treatment are met. Notwithstanding, previous literature on the living conditions of foreign prisoners in Spain is scarce and it does not distinguish if the problems identified are common to every prisoner or they only affect non-natives. Therefore, our goal is to test if quality of prison life differs between native and migrant prisoners in four Spanish prisons. For this purpose, we compare the answers of both groups to the Measuring Quality of Prison Life survey. Our results show that the studied prisons seem to be providing equal treatment to native and migrant prisoners, although the latter face more difficulties for sentence progression that should be addressed. Moreover, it is argued that differences among groups of migrants should be considered when implementing penitentiary policies since recognizing their needs as a non-homogeneous group allows for providing equal treatment.
This article has three main purposes: (1) To describe an in-prison methodology for measuring the moral quality of life, developed organically out of experience and necessity. It is conducted over an intense but exceptionally brief period of time. (2) To reveal and reflect on our intellectual methodology: how do we describe, think, interpret and theorise about prison life in our work together, especially in a transnational team? (3) Finally, to consider the benefits and challenges of collaboration and intense immersion across national boundaries, in a study of Norgerhaven prison in the Netherlands. We found that our own implicit prison moralities varied significantly, as we worked together to describe a prison that surprised us, and our participants, hugely.
La COVID-19 ha supuesto un reto para las prisiones de todo el mundo. Como en otros países, una de las medidas adoptadas en España fue suspender las visitas de familiares y otros allegados para prevenir el contagio en el interior de las prisiones. Esta medida ha evidenciado la falta de digitalización de las prisiones españolas, lo que ha sido un obstáculo a la hora de compensar la suspensión de las visitas con comunicaciones telemáticas. El objetivo de este artículo es reflexionar sobre el escaso nivel de digitalización de las prisiones españolas a propósito de la situación generada por la COVID-19. Para ello, partimos de la legislación penitenciaria en materia de comunicaciones, constatando que, actualmente, no existe una regulación adecuada que permita el uso de la tecnología para un contacto con el exterior más normalizado, siendo las visitas, las llamadas telefónicas y las cartas los únicos métodos disponibles. Posteriormente, repasamos las medidas adoptadas por la Administración penitenciaria española durante el estado de alarma causado por la pandemia, mostrando los obstáculos que han tenido las personas presas y sus familiares. A continuación, exponemos algunos de los argumentos que explican la resistencia a la digitalización de la Administración penitenciaria, centrados principalmente en la cuestión de la seguridad. Por último, defendemos la digitalización de las prisiones, considerando que esta puede contribuir a la reinserción de las personas presas, a la humanidad de la pena y a la seguridad de los centros.
Los funcionarios de interior son un elemento fundamental para el buen funcionamiento de los centros penitenciarios, pues son los encargados de mantener el orden y de prestar de los servicios necesarios para garantizar los derechos de las personas presas. En consecuencia, el devenir diario de la prisión y la calidad del trato recibido por las personas presas dependen de cómo los funcionarios de interior desempeñan estas tareas. Sin embargo, poco sabemos acerca de su realidad laboral, pues a pesar del interés que ha suscitado la prisión en España desde un punto de vista criminológico, los funcionarios de interior han sido objeto de muy pocas investigaciones en nuestro país.
Esta monografía es un punto de partida para el estudio de los funcionarios de interior en el contexto español. La primera parte del libro contextualiza la figura del funcionario de interior en la literatura criminológica, en la historia penitenciaria española y en el marco legislativo actual. En la segunda parte, se adopta la perspectiva de los funcionarios de interior de dos centros penitenciarios españoles y se analiza mediante una investigación empírica cómo dan forma a su rol en el desarrollo diario de sus funciones. Esta investigación busca responder a tres preguntas sobre los funcionarios de interior: ¿Cómo mantienen el orden y la seguridad interior en prisión?, ¿qué trato proporcionan a las personas presas con las que conviven en el día a día penitenciario? y ¿cómo colaboran en la reeducación y la reinserción de los penados?
https://atelierlibrosjuridicos.com/libreria-juridica/de-carceleros-y-ayudantes-9788418244230/
In recent years there has been growing attention for so-called crimmigration prisons: all-foreign prisons with immigration staff embedded where not rehabilitation, but deportation is the ultimate aim. Following Norway and the United Kingdom, since 2014 the Netherlands is another country with such a prison. This article analyses penal policies in the Netherlands vis-à-vis foreign national prisoners, including the establishment of the crimmigration prison. Drawing on extensive empirical fieldwork in the crimmigration prison, it subsequently examines how this is experienced and understood by both prison officers and foreign national officers. The results show that the limited opportunities to work on rehabilitation means that prison officers struggle to find meaning and satisfaction in their work. For prisoners, experiences in the crimmigration prison strongly depend on their subjective identity and attachment to the Netherlands. Whereas the lack of meaningful activities and remote location of the prison considerably add to the pains they experience, specific elements of the prison also help to mitigate some of the pains foreign national prisoners most commonly experience, especially isolation and uncertainty. The article finishes by a discussion about what this says about how the state should treat individuals it seeks to both punish and deport.
Open prisons are low-security penitentiary institutions in which living conditions are less strict than in closed prisons, and where prisoners have more contact with the outside world. Despite sharing important features, some variations can be found in the model of open prisons in different countries. This article describes the Catalan open prison model, characterized by the fact that prisoners serve the sentence in full semi-liberty; that is, by day they work and spend time with their families or doing other activities, but return to prison to sleep. As a contribution
to the comparative study of open prisons, I describe here how Catalan open prisons are run and discuss the concept of ‘openness’ with reference, above all, to the open prisons that exist in Scandinavian countries. This work shows that the degree of openness of open prisons varies considerably between different countries – therefore approaching community penalties or closed prisons in a greater or lesser extent – and suggests that the role that open prisons are granted in each penal system is part of the explanation.
Prisons are a difficult terrain in which to undertake research. Our experience in conducting a comprehensive prevalence study of health factors across New South Wales has provided us with a unique perspective on how to overcome common difficulties when undertaking prison-based research that may otherwise seem insurmountable. We outline six domains that constitute major challenges to the successful completion of projects as we understand them and offer practical solutions where possible. Our aim is to encourage researchers to undertake this important work in a manner that will provide positive outcomes for researchers, organizations working in the corrections space, and inmates.
Researchers undertaking qualitative interview and focus group research with people in prison must consider the research methods they use, given the ethical and practical complexities of prison-based research. In particular, there are explicit and implicit coercion risks and barriers to access, privacy, and confidentiality. To examine how the challenges of conducting rigorous qualitative research with prisoners were handled, we undertook a scoping review of recruitment and data collection processes reported in qualitative research with prisoners. We searched for peer-reviewed articles of qualitative interview and focus group research with adult prisoners, published in the English language from 2005 to 2017, using MEDLINE, Embase, PsycINFO, and CINAHL databases. There were 142 articles reporting on 126 studies which met the review inclusion criteria. Challenges related to coercion risk, participant recruitment, sampling, confidentiality, privacy, and working with prison-based intermediaries should be explicitly addressed and reported. Our findings highlight key considerations and contextualized strategies for recruitment and data collection for researchers who seek to conduct rigorous and ethical qualitative research with prisoners.
Estudios previos sobre la vida en los centros penitenciarios españoles han tendido a hablar de ‘la’ prisión como una institución con condiciones de encarcelamiento uniformes. Sin embargo, la literatura internacional sugiere que la privación de libertad puede experimentarse de forma muy distinta según el centro penitenciario donde se cumpla condena. Esta investigación analiza si existen distintos tipos de prisión en España, a qué factores son debidas dichas diferencias, cuáles son más relevantes y cuáles son sus implicaciones.
Con esta finalidad, hemos administrado el cuestionario Measuring Quality of Prison Life a quinientos presos en cuatro centros penitenciarios de Barcelona. Los resultados de nuestro estudio muestran que la calidad de vida difiere significativamente entre las prisiones analizadas. Estas diferencias, que conllevan importantes consecuencias para las personas presas, no obedecen en exclusiva al historial del interno, sino también, o sobre todo, a la organización del centro y al sistema de relaciones interpersonales existente.
In 2009, the then Minister of Justice of Belgium, Stefaan De Clerck, struggled with a long-standing problem of serious prison overcrowding, whilst the Netherlands was closing down prisons due to a decreasing prison population. As the Penitentiary Institution of Tilburg (PI Tilburg), a prison in the Netherlands which is located near the Belgian border, was also facing closure and thus unemployment of its staff, this situation was taken as an opportunity to find a temporary solution for both governments’ penitentiary problems. An agreement between the two countries was set, and from February 2010 onwards Belgian inmates in prisons dispersed all over the country were gradually transferred to the Dutch PI Tilburg and were detained under Belgian penitentiary legislation and the Belgian prison regime. The PI Tilburg is run by Dutch staff under shared Belgian and Dutch governance. This has resulted in a unique encounter and melding of different legal regulations, prison regimes and cultures.
In this article we examine the characteristics, challenges and added value of qualitative prison research in a Belgian context. As the many dynamics and challenges of qualitative research are often underreported in academic publications, we pay particular attention to the research processes and the pains and gains of qualitative prison research. Firstly, drawing on experiences from several prison studies, we describe the different steps of gaining access to the field as a constant process of negotiation. Secondly, we discuss some of the dilemmas of prison research based on two ethnographic studies of prison staff. We end with discussion of the value added by a qualitative research approach to facilitate understanding of what is at stake in prisons and how this fits with a critical research position.
Where is the pain in exceptional prisons? A new generation of prisons produces unusual ‘pains of imprisonment’ which scholars of punishment are only beginning to catalog. This article brings the reader inside the social milieu of Norway’s ‘Prison Island’, a large, minimum security (‘open’) prison. Here inmates live in self-organized cottages and enjoy relatively unrestricted freedom of movement. But even under exceptional conditions of Scandinavian incarceration, new vectors and modes of punishment arise that produce ‘pains of freedom’, a notion drawing on Crewe’s historicizing examination of Sykes’ concept. Serving as an addition to conventional sociological conceptualizations of prison pains, the ‘pains of freedom’ can be classified into five sub-categories: (1) confusion; (2) anxiety and boundlessness; (3) ambiguity; (4) relative deprivation; and (5) individual responsibility. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with 15 inmates, it is shown that freedom is occasionally experienced as ambiguous, bittersweet or tainted. These new pains may be indicative of what is in stock for clients of future penal regimes in other societies.
This article reflects on some of the tensions experienced in doing prison research. Both qualitative and quantitative `styles of research'—in so far as they can be characterized as discrete styles—have their dangers and rewards. The `truths' of sociology's concern with humanistic method and its discoveries of the painfulness of prison are valid, and yet need to be reconciled with quantitative findings about the apparent ordinariness of prison for generalized groups of prisoners, about differences between prisoners and individual instances of violence/suicide/disorder, whose origins may have individual-psychological as well as situational-sociological components, and about the distinctions which may be drawn between prisons—some having more legitimate regimes than others. The absence of `pain' from quantitative research accounts of prison life is surprising. The author argues that research in any human environment without subjective feeling is almost impossible—particularly in a prison. These feelings—belonging to staff, prisoners and researchers—can be a significant guide to or even source of valuable data. Recent accounts of the role of emotion in criminology and in research have been helpful in making sense of some of the turbulence discovered and experienced by members of the research team involved in a recent project.
Based on the Liverpool Desistance Study, this book compares and contrasts the stories of ex-convicts who are actively involved in criminal behavior with those who are desisting from crime and drug use. Extensive excerpts from the study reveal two types of personal narratives: a "condemnation" script favored by active offenders and a "generative" script favored by desisters. The way that these scripts are constructed and the manner in which they are used is then examined in light of contemporary criminological and psychological thought. The results suggests that success in reform depends on providing rehabilitative opportunities that reinforce the generative script. This study reveals a constructive new direction for offender rehabilitation efforts and will appeal to a wide range of readers from psychologists and criminologists to legislators, administrators, substance abuse counselors, and offenders themselves. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
There is considerable confusion regarding the ethical appropriateness of using incentives in research with human subjects. Previous work on determining whether incentives are unethical considers them as a form of undue influence or coercive offer. We understand the ethical issue of undue influence as an issue, not of coercion, but of corruption of judgment. By doing so we find that, for the most part, the use of incentives to recruit and retain research subjects is innocuous. But there are some instances where it is not. Specifically, incentives become problematic when conjoined with the following factors, singly or in combination with one another: where the subject is in a dependency relationship with the researcher, where the risks are particularly high, where the research is degrading, where the participant will only consent if the incentive is relatively large because the participant's aversion to the study is strong, and where the aversion is a principled one. The factors we have identified and the kinds of judgments they require differ substantially from those considered crucial in most previous discussions of the ethics of employing incentives in research with human subjects.
This book constitutes a critical case study of the modern search for public sector reform. It includes a detailed account of a study aimed at developing a meaningful way of evaluating difficult-to-measure moral dimensions of the quality of prisons. Penal practices, values, and sensibilities have undergone important transformations over the period 1990-2003. Part of this transformation included a serious flirtation with a liberal penal project that went wrong. A significant factor in this unfortunate turn of events was a lack of clarity, by those working in and managing prisons, about important terms such as ‘justice’, ‘liberal’, and ‘care’, and how they might apply to daily penal life. Official measures of the prison seem to lack relevance to many who live and work in prison and to their critics. The author proposes that a truer test of the quality of prison life is what staff and prisoners have to say about those aspects of prison life that ‘matter most’: relationships, fairness, order, and the quality of their treatment. The book attempts a detailed analysis and measurement of these dimensions in five prisons. It finds significant differences between establishments in these areas of prison life, and some departures from the official vision of the prison supported by the performance framework. The information revolution has generated unprecedented levels of knowledge about individual prisons, as well as providing a management reach into establishments from a distance, and a capacity for ‘chronic revision’, that was unimaginable fifty years ago. Another major transformation – the modernisation project – brought with it a new, but flawed, ‘craft’ of performance monitoring and measurement aimed at solving some of the problems of prison management. This book explores the arrival and the impact of this concept of performance and the links apparently forged between managerialism and moral values.
Forward by Frank T. Cullen. Revised and updated, this new edition of the highly successful text addresses the origins, evolution, and promise of America’s penal system.
Along with extensive revisions to all chapters, changes for this new edition include:
• greatly expanded coverage of the types of hardships experienced in prison
• completely rewritten chapters on prisoner violence and suggested reforms
• a new chapter on “supermax” prison facilities with an assessment of the efficacy of long-term segregation.
The text retains the popular previous edition’s vivid and often poignant ethnographic accounts drawn from male and female inmates along with prison staff, giving voice to the complexities of contemporary prison life—and greatly enhances our understanding of the prison experience and urgent need for reform.
Hard Time, 4th Edition offers illuminating insights into life behind and beyond the prison bars in America—a nation whose criminal justice system incarcerates more of its citizens than anywhere else in the world.
Convict criminology is a promising new approach to criminology that is rooted in the study of criminology by people who have firsthand experience of imprisonment. This book is the first to trace the emergence of convict criminology and explore its potential relevance outside the United States, specifically in the United Kingdom and Europe. Presenting uniquely reflective scholarship that combines personal experience with critical perspectives, it examines the ways that prisoners, ex-prisoners, and prison research contribute to knowledge of criminology and the ways that racism, colonialism, and class shape both the penal experience and the social world beyond the prison. Rooted in the author's own experience of imprisonment, Convict Criminology will be of use for students, scholars, and practitioners in the field.
Centered on the ethnography of prisons and field research on penal confinement, this review maps out current developments and characterizes them in relation to key themes that shaped earlier approaches. Further internationalizing the ethnographic discussion on prisons by broadening the predominant focus on the United States and the English-speaking world, the review is organized around a main line of discussion: the prison-society relation and the articulation between intramural and extramural worlds. More or less apparent in field research, this articulation is addressed from different perspectives-within and across different scales and analytic frames-whether centered more on the workings of the institution or on prisoners and their social worlds, both within and outside walls. The porosity of prison boundaries, increasingly acknowledged, has also been problematized and ethnographically documented in different ways: from prison-in-context to interface approaches, both more reflexive and attuned to broader theoretical debates.
This chapter presents three related challenges faced by the 'discipline' of criminology, with the goal of promoting dialogue about the field's future. It first argues that although criminology has achieved disciplinary status with discrete areas of specialization, it is vitally important that criminological research and education draw on the range of other disciplinary knowledge that intersect with criminology. Second, it explores how the development of research branches in many criminal justice agencies, who are rightly concerned with the everyday pragmatics of policing or punishing, can (and in some cases do) shape and restrict research possibilities. It examines how emerging forms of institutional protectionism restrict the production of critical criminological knowledge. These observations may be applicable to other countries, but the focus is on the research landscape in Canada. Finally, the chapter considers how commitments to intellectual diversity and the restrictions imposed on certain types of 'critical' scholarship can complicate future criminologists' research and education. These three themes are linked by a broader interest in criminological knowledge, its structure and progression as well as by a need to discuss how various institutional 'boundaries' shape our theorizing, research questions, types of analysis, and scholarly standards.
This article first takes the reader inside the Los Angeles County Jail, the largest detention facility in the `Free World', to give a ground-level sense of how the entry portal of the US detention system operates by way of prelude to this special issue on the ethnography of the prison. A survey of the recent sociology and anthropology of carceral institutions shows that field studies depicting the everyday world of inmates in America have gone into eclipse just when they were most needed on both scientific and political grounds following the turn toward the penal management of poverty and the correlative return of the prison to the forefront of the societal scene. Accordingly, this issue seeks to reinvigorate and to internationalize the ethnography of the carceral universe understood both as a microcosm endowed with its own material and symbolic tropism and as vector of social forces, political nexi, and cultural processes that traverse its walls. Field researchers need to worry less about `interrupting the terms of the debate' about the prison and more about getting inside and around penal facilities to carry out intensive, close-up observation of the myriad relations they contain and support. This article discusses the obstacles to such research, including questions of access and funding, the professional organization of academe, the lowly social and therefore scientific status of the object of investigation, and the (mis)use of the military metaphor of `collateral damage'. It concludes by suggesting that getting `in and out of the belly of the beast' offers a unique vantage point from which to contribute to the comparative ethnography of the state in the age of triumphant neoliberalism.
The prison system of England and Wales relies on a number of measures, said to be 'merely administrative' in character, to maintain order in its establishments. In this paper the official discourse on order and control in prisons is examined and the characteristic methods of identifying 'control problem' prisoners are criticised. The processes by which 'control problems' are socially constructed and then entered into the official discourse are explored through an analysis of 'disciplinary transfers' - especially the use of the Circular Instruction 10 of 1974 procedure whereby prisoners can be transferred to special cells in local prisons for a 28 day 'cooling off' period. The analysis is based on observations carried out in five prisons and interviews with both prisoners and security staff as well as documentary records.
This article is coauthored by four prisoners and a prison-researcher. In it, the authors discuss the differing aims and aspirations of research participants and scholars and their implications for doing prison research. Unlike most other accounts of prison research, the authors stress the experience of those being interviewed rather than that of the interviewer. The authors pay particular attention to the emotional nature of being part of a study and how a researcher gains participants’ trust. The authors also consider the utility of academic research and how inmate voices might be effectively harnessed to build a sustained critique of the U.S. prison system.
Examines the maximum security prison as a living environment and illustrates the personal impact prisons have on individual prisoners. Practical solutions to the problem of making prisons more effective and humane are proposed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
After several years of study of the sociological influences at work in a typical American state penitentiary of about 2,300 inmates it is concluded that "the prisoner's world is an atomized world. Its people are atoms acting in confusion. It is dominated and it submits. Its own community is without a well-established social structure. Recognized values produce a myriad of conflicting attitudes… There is no consensus for a common goal. The inmates' conflict with officialdom and opposition toward society is only slightly greater in degree than conflict and opposition among themselves. Trikery and dishonesty overshadow sympathy and coöperation. Such coöperation as exists is largely symbiotic in nature. Social controls are only partially effective… . Except for the few, there is bewilderment. No one knows, the dogmas and codes notwithstanding, exactly what is important… . While no effort has been made to compare the prison world with a non-penal community, certain broad similarities become evident. In a sense the prison culture reflects the American culture, for it is a culture within it." Prisonization, or the process of taking on in greater or less degree of the folkways, mores, customs, and general culture of the penitentiary, may so disrupt the prisoner's personality that a happy adjustment in any community becomes next to impossible. The methodologies used were case studies, statistical tabulations, autobiographies, and essays written by prisoners upon a variety of suggested topics. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The Palgrave handbook of prison ethnography
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Huizen. Naar een duurzame penitentiaire aanpak
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Autoethnography and emotion as intellectual resources: Doing prison research differently. Qualitative inquiry
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Un pie en la calle y otro en prisión. El cumplimiento de la pena de prisión en semilibertad [One foot in and one foot out: Serving a prison sentence in an open prison
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The society of captives
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La cárcel en España: mediciones y condiciones del encarcelamiento en el siglo XXI. Revista de Derecho Penal y Criminología
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¿ De qué se quejan las personas presas? Estudio del sistema de peticiones y quejas ante la administración penitenciaria en España. Revista electrónica de ciencia penal y criminología
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La cárcel en el entorno familiar. Estudio de las repercusiones del encarcelamiento sobre las familias: problemáticas y necesidades. Observatori del Sistema Penal i dels Drets Humans
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