Deborah H. Drake

Prisons, punishment and the pursuit of security

Nation states around the globe are struggling with increasing concerns over human and global insecurity. Within this climate crime and criminal justice policies in many countries have become key areas of political focus, with the prison poised to play an important role in security strategies. This book problematises the persistent use of prisons and punishment and their role in pursuing higher levels of human security. Drawing on extensive, qualitative research in mens long-term, maximum-security prisons in England, questions are raised about the means by which security is pursued. The book argues against the use of severe sanctions as a means through which to calm public fears, achieve greater political legitimacy, and improve public security. By considering problems of security alongside those of long-term prisons, the book grapples with thorny and perennial problems associated with violence, vengeance and calls for punishment.

Performing the role of ethnographer: processing and managing the emotional dimensions of prison research

This article presents a reflective account of the emotional dimensions of in-depth field research in prisons. Drawing on the work of Goffman to make sense of ethnographic processes and techniques, it is argued that performance and impression management play crucial roles in the research process. However, it is suggested that there are commensurate emotional costs associated with the roles and identities that ethnographers might enact in the field. It is argued that the finer details of ethnographic practice can be better understood when the emotional dimensions of research experiences are carefully analysed and processed.

Reconsidering Respect: Its Role in Her Majesty's Prison Service

This article examines the meaning of respect in the interpersonal relationships within Her Majesty’s Prison Service. It is argued that respect-as-esteem and respect-as-consideration are often confused and unequally emphasised in modern society. This confusion is especially evident within the prison context where, due to the prison service’s ‘decency agenda’, the respectful treatment of inmates has become a topical issue. What does respect mean in prison? Why is it important? How can respectful relationships be established between staff and inmates? This article discusses these questions and proposes that there are different forms of respect possible between people. It is argued that there needs to be a recognition of the nuances of meaning when we use the word respect and that ‘respect-as-consideration’ may be the form of respect most consistently achievable, at the present time, within interpersonal relationships in English and Welsh prisons.

The ‘dangerous other’ in maximum-security prisons:

Drawing on data from maximum-security prisons in England, this article explores the way the representation of criminals as ‘dangerous others’ manifests in prison discourse and practice. Following Bourdieu, it is argued that within the ‘habitus of maximum-security’, prison staff become somewhat predisposed to seeing prisoners as essentialized, ‘dangerous others’ who are not ‘like us’, a perspective that is also reinforced in popular and tabloid print media outside the prison walls. The strength of these representations coupled with the habitus of maximum-security thus constrains possibilities for alternative representations of prisoners labelled as ‘dangerous others’ or for alternative ways of structuring the ethos and conditions of maximum-security prisons.

Hearing new voices: Re-viewing Youth Justice Policy through Practitioners’ Relationships with Young People

The relationship between young people and practitioners is the centrepiece of youth justice provision, yet little research-based knowledge has accumulated on its minutiae. After reviewing reforms affecting professional discretion, the article draws on the concepts of dyadic relationships and praxis to reinvigorate a research agenda aimed at delineating a more nuanced understanding of practice relationships. Drawing on practice wisdom from across related social work fields, we argue that centralizing the practitioner-young person relationship remains the key to successful practice and thus needs greater, more detailed research attention. These claims are supported with a number of pilot interviews with youth justice workers about successful interventions that complement and extend related studies. The article concludes with suggestions for research to enable joint activity between young people and practitioners to ‘rethink’ youth justice.

Emotional engagements: on sinking and swimming in prison research and ethnography

Undertaking in-depth, ethnographic research in prisons requires significant amounts of practical and emotional commitment. By entering the prison world, researchers are able to see a world that few others gain access to, listen to stories that are rarely heard, and ask questions that many are interested in. Whilst prison researchers might be considered ‘privileged’ in the sense that they gain access to places that are closed off from most members of the public, there is another side to the experience of prison research that is often left under-explored: the emotional trials and costs that can accompany ‘deep end’ research within the confines of the prison world. This article considers some of the emotional dimensions and challenges of prison research, arguing that, whilst it is uncomfortable and exposing for researchers to examine the emotional dimensions of research, analysis of the role emotions can play has been under-examined in prison studies, despite their importance to the research process (Yuen, 2011). We suggest that knowledge and understanding about prison life and the lived experience of imprisonment can be deepened and enriched when researchers identify and systematically process their emotions as a form of data.

Researching prisoner experiences with prison officers: An action research-inspired approach

This article reports on research that incorporated action research-inspired dimensions on a project conducted in three maximum-security prisons in England. The project was aimed at collecting ethnographically informed data on prisoner experiences, at developing a method by which such data could be systematically and routinely collected by prison staff and at facilitating opportunities for prison officers to understand the ‘pains of imprisonment’ from the perspectives of prisoners. The challenges and limitations of the project are discussed, with particular reference to the paradox of participation and the role of power relations within prisons and within the research process. It is suggested that despite the inherent difficulties of attempting a participative approach with more powerful actors, facilitating change on a larger scale may be best served by developing a ‘pedagogy of the oppressors’ alongside a ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’.

General Introduction: What Ethnography Tells Us about Prisons and What Prisons Tell Us about Ethnography

The practice of ethnography as a research method has a long history that places special importance on understanding the perspectives of the people under study and of observing their activities in everyday life (Hammersley and Atkinson, 1983). It is a method used by researchers in a variety of disciplines, but it is perhaps most famously associated with social anthropology and the study of indigenous cultures (Malinowski, 1922; Evans-Pritchard, 1937; Turnbull, 1961). Ethnographers aim to produce rich and detailed accounts of people and the social processes they are embedded in. For these reasons, it is often employed by educational, health and social sciences researchers in a wide variety of institutional, community and other social settings.

‘Crossing the line’: Criminological expertise, policy advice and the ‘quarrelling society’

In October 2009, Professor David Nutt, eminent neuropsychopharmacologist and world leading expert on drugs, was dismissed as Chair of the UK government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs for comments he made at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies’ Eve Saville lecture. This article considers the role of evidence in political decision-making through the case of David Nutt. It is argued that the status of expert knowledge is in crisis for both the natural and the social sciences. We examine the role of the criminological advisor within emerging discourses of public criminology and suggest that high-stakes political issues can open up unprecedented opportunities for critical voices to engage in unbridled critique and to mobilise movements of dissent.

Finding Secrets and Secret Findings: Confronting the Limits of the Ethnographer’s Gaze

Ethnography, inevitably, can only provide a partial account of the culture, society or field under study. James Clifford (1986: 7) wrote, ‘Even the best ethnographic texts … are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through them, in ways their authors cannot fully control.’ Here, Clifford was referring to the construction of ethnographic writing and the fact that ethnographers inevitably must translate the reality of informants into a finished, narrative account. It is the ethnographer who ultimately chooses what to include or exclude in their authored expression of the cultures, lives and meanings that were observed and described to them in the field. Far from threatening the empirical value of the ethnographic endeavour, its partial nature can mirror ‘the partiality of cultural and historical truths, the ways they are systematic and exclusive’ (p. 6). Hammersley and Atkinson (1995: 255) argue, ‘The relationship between the ethnographic text and its subject-matter may not be entirely straightforward. But it is not totally arbitrary … There are social actors and social life outside the text, and there are referential relationships between them.’