Barry Godfrey

Towards ethical practice in the use of archived transcripted interviews

Transcribed archived interviews are a data source which are becoming more widely used across a range of disciplines. Their use raises important ethical issues, particularly in the areas of relationships with research participants; informed consent; and confidentiality. The existing ethical guidelines that are available for social scientists or historians refer to the carrying out of interviews, but not to the secondary use of the transcripts that sometimes result from oral history or qualitative social research projects. This paper therefore questions whether the ethical relationship between interviewer and interviewee can be adopted and maintained by the reader of a transcripted interview and suggests that the ethical use of transcripted life-narratives cannot be governed by legal or contractual rules of possession, nor solely by the regulations laid down by oral history/archival organisations. The article concludes by asserting a need for social scientists and historians to develop and negotiate a shared ethical practice in the use of transcribed archived material and suggesting some approaches that may be taken.

The role of historically-embedded structures in processes of criminal reform A structural criminology of desistance

The body of literature on why people stop offending has advanced tremendously in the past decade. Previously, when the topic was mentioned (if at all), it was an aside to the main focus of study. This situation has now changed dramatically; there are now a number of studies which have treated desistance either as a major part of the investigation or as a core or chief focal point, and debates about how best to understand the processes of desistance and to foster these are now in full swing. This essay will attempt to move the debate on yet further. Most studies of desistance have been undertaken using data derived from or about subjects who lived all or most of their lives in the latter half of the 20th century. The study of desistance is therefore largely the study of desistance in the contemporary age. This temporal bias is due, in part, to the growth of social scientific research in North America and Europe after the 1950s. In this essay we contend that studying previous societal forms and processes can tell us something about how those processes associated with desistance operate, and that studying society over the long durée can tell us something about how and why present-day social formations produce the outcomes they do with regards to desistance from crime.

Loss, collective memory and transcripted oral histories

This article introduces examples of transcripted archived life histories analysed as part of a research project on the meanings of violence in the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcenturies. The article reveals commonly occurring narrative forms in the life stories of those interviewed, particularly those expressing loss. The article uses transcripted Australian oral histories, particularly the narration of Millie W., who describes the death of her parents in a boating tragedy in 1905, to suggest that individual life-story narratives can only be interpreted within socio-historical contexts. It then discusses the methodological problems this raises, and how they can be negotiated through the adoption of appropriate interpretative strategies.

Intergenerational offending in Liverpool and the north-west of England, 1850–1914

Using contemporary sources from the north-west of England in the Victorian period, the authors examine the putative connections made by contemporaries which linked together ‘bad’ parenting and the transmission of criminal traits. Poor parenting practices were a prevalent explanation for juvenile (leading onto sustained) delinquency, especially in the mid to late nineteenth century. Popular narratives by Charles Dickens and media opinion-formers were very influential in depicting neglectful mothers who did not socialise their children into law-abiding, useful members of society, and criminal fathers who inducted their children into their own criminal affairs and organisations. This article examines the reality of intergenerational offending (using prison- and court-generated data) to show that there is very little convincing research that proves direct intergenerational transmission of offending practices (i.e. parent-to-child-offending transmission). The authors then examine other possible routes of intergenerational offending using case studies and archival research, and the article concludes that environmental/socio-economic conditions and wider familial/neighbourhood relationships were, in fact, the main trigger for onset of offending, and the maintenance of criminal careers, rather than direct familial transmission. The article is therefore an important marker in understanding the processes which inhibit/generate criminality in a significant number of juvenile offenders in this period.

Landscapes of Production and Punishment: Convict labour in the Australian context:

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project that uses archaeological and historical sources to explore the formation of a penal landscape in the Australian colonial context. The project focuses on the convict-period legacy of the Tasman Peninsula (Tasmania, Australia), in particular the former penal station of Port Arthur (1830–1877). The research utilises three exceptional data series to examine the impact of convict labour on landscape and the convict body: the archaeological record of the Tasman Peninsula, the life course data of the convicts and the administrative record generated by decades of convict labour management. Through these, the research seeks to demonstrate how changing ideologies affected the processes and outcomes of convict labour and its products, as well as how the landscapes we see today were formed and developed in response to a complex interplay of multi-scalar penological and economic influences. Areas of inquiry: Australian convict archaeology and history. The archaeology and history of Australian convict labour management. The archaeology and history of the Tasman Peninsula.

Landscapes of production and punishment: convict labour management on the Tasman Peninsula 1830–1877

The ‘Landscapes of Production and Punishment’ project aims to examine how convict labour from 1830–1877 affected the built and natural landscapes of the Tasman Peninsula, as well as the lives of the convicts themselves.

Soldiers and Victims: Conceptions of Military Service and Victimhood, 1914–45

This chapter explores the competing ways in which the soldier was reimagined in interwar commemorative culture. It charts the shift in representations of the soldier in the interwar years—the military hero, the frightened youth, the conscientious objector, the victim of shell-shock and war-injury/death—and contributes to a deeper understanding of war and the politics of victimhood. Like earlier memorials that honoured the war dead, such as the repatriation of soldier’s bodies (which originated in World War I [WWI]), the establishment of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (1917) and the siting of a Tomb of the Unknown Warrior (1920), the Cenotaph highlighted the equalizing nature of death, bereavement, and sacrifice. It also became a national focus for a re-evaluation of military service. The chapter contends that during this period, and because of this commemorative focus, the soldier came to assume the mantle of victimhood for the first time; and that, although there was then another rapid reconception of the soldier as ‘everyman’ hero rather than victim of warfare in the immediate build up to WWII (notions of victimhood and national service being incompatible), the trope of soldier-victim was well-enough established for it to be re-evoked in the early twenty-first century.

Bringing the Prisoner into View: English and Welsh Census Data and the Victorian Prison Population

The 1881 England and Wales census is now available as a fully-searchable electronic file. What can this source of big data tell us about the shape of the late-Victorian prison population? This article explores how the 1881 census compares to other sources of prison population data, and examines how the census can be analysed to reveal the demographic structure of the prison population in England and Wales. We argue that the census enables us to bring breadth of information about incarcerated individuals, identifying the ‘typical’ and ‘atypical’ prisoner, to a depth of information already available through small-scale qualitative research. In doing so, census data provides both quantitative and qualitative data essential for bringing context and scale to social and personal histories of crime.

Crime, Police, and Penal Policy: European Experiences 1750–1940. By Clive Emsley

traditional past and affluent modernity. The volume has a tight programme, outlined in the editors’ introduction and their prefaces to each of three sections. The first is on tourism narratives of heritage. The second, obscurely titled ‘Tourism, Transgression and Shifting Uses of Social Capital’, proves to be a catch-all phrasing to cover erotic constructions of tourists, municipal controls, ex-Untouchable funeral feasts, tourist enclaves in cities, and maharajas marketing the sprawling palatial spaces they control. Finally, the third section, ‘Tourism and Spiritual Spaces’, is about pilgrimage sites (which clearly have a raison d’être outside orientalist heritage constructs, though John Cort’s analysis of the tensions between Western tourists and Brahman priests at Pushkar Lake – and the interconnecting of needs between the two groups – is illuminating). The last chapter of the section scrutinizes the intermix between tourism and the politics of Hindu nationalism. In all there are eleven contributors, each deeply committed to studying Rajasthan; the volume had its beginnings at the Fifth Annual Conference on Rajasthan Studies in Jaipur in 2001 and evolved thereafter. Some chapters have drawn on research gathered for other projects, so that their material has been made to fit into the focused concerns of this volume. Some chapters are more successful in achieving the reorientation than others, though the detail is usually interesting. The editors are to be congratulated on ensuring a cohesive interpretive line, and producing a volume that has significant detail and is resonant in its conceptual overviews. It provides insights into the nexus between tourism, heritage and the reworkings of historical interpretation, and even more into the complexities of Rajasthani life in what may well in the future be seen to be a distinctive time of transition. The book more than achieves the editors’ objectives in theorizing tourism ‘as an intersection of gazes, of multiple and conflicting narratives’ (p. xxxi).