There is both hope and frustration in this article. A recent research exercise in a prison found it to be inspirational in its ethos, relationships and mission. Prisoners talked passionately about their experiences in it and its impact on their personal development. But prisoners received very little resettlement support and things sometimes went wrong as soon as they were released, not because of any ‘moral failings’ on their part, but because they could not even navigate the journey ‘home’. It looked like everything we know cumulatively about ‘better prisons’, but its prisoners were failed as they transitioned out. More ‘tragic imagination’ is required in penal policy.
Can a prison in the Netherlands, that is neither ‘Dutch’ nor ‘Norwegian’, be ‘legitimate?’ What are the moral challenges? Our study of the controversial Norgerhaven project—a Norwegian prison located in the Netherlands—found that this ‘experiment’ generated one of the most reflexive, ‘deliberative’ prisons we have encountered. Officials involved in the decision assumed that the two jurisdictions were alike in their values. Few were prepared for the differences that arose. This hybrid prison made punishment, the use of authority, and the meanings of fairness, professionalism and discipline unusually explicit as staff negotiated their practices, creating a shift from ‘practical’ to ‘discursive’ consciousness and exposing many of the complexities of liberal penal power.
Drawing on preparatory work for a study of prison life in Tunisia, this article explores the twin practices of concealing and revealing that are common features of bureaucratic and ethnographic practice. Insights from the anthropology of bureaucracy and secrecy are brought into conversation with the experience of prison ethnographers (seasoned and novice) to illuminate the way prisons as peculiar sites of rule-based domination call for a particular hyper-reflexive methodological approach best understood as ‘craft’. The encounter between research team and prison bureaucracy is documented, and its multi-layered quality illustrated with descriptions of interactions in three prisons and at prison headquarters. This hesitant, slowly unfolding, constrained and contingent negotiation of boundaries is characterised as a gradual sharing of secrets where the configuration of our relationship with gatekeepers – with whom we shared and who shared with us – is highly instructive about prison life, bureaucratic practice and ethnography. The article demonstrates the fundamental role of practices of concealment and revelation in human and institutional interaction.
This chapter considers the relationships between criminology and the worlds of penal policy and practice. It focuses in particular on the day-to-day interactions the authors of the chapter forge in their research lives and on their ‘effects’ and failures as ‘engaged criminologists’. The chapter supports forms of criminological engagement that are subtle, long term and relational rather than occasional, mechanical, linear, or instrumental, and proposes that these forms of engagement improve understanding but require constant reflection and negotiation. This chapter argues that knowledge-generation is slow and cumulative; it takes time to ‘read a situation’ in complex human and social environments and it should be an iterative process with the research community and the world of practice teaching, learning from each other at every step of the way. Research participants welcome a ‘full’ research presence of the kind described in this chapter. For knowledge to ‘do good’, it needs to be (qualitatively) ‘good’ and should be produced through patient, honest, rigorous, and disciplined but also deeply engaged forms of enquiry. This chapter suggests that our institutional structures often fail to support this model of research.
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