Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America

Appendix: Methodology and Data Sources

Appendix Methodology and Data Sources Prior to beginning ‹eldwork, I traveled to ‹ve large cities and the prisons they fed. I selected the District of Columbia over Baltimore, Houston, Los Angeles, New Haven, New York City, and San Francisco for a number of reasons, though I suspect the results would not have been signi‹cantly different in any of those cities. The District is about average in ways that matter. For example, the District ranks in the middle of the largest ‹fty cities by population. It also has an incarceration rate that is neither particularly high nor low and (at least prior to federal takeover of the correctional system) faced the same dif‹culties that many states have with regard to prison overcrowding and corrections funding. The District is atypical in ways that were useful to this study as well. Unlike most other mid-sized cities, a number of excellent ethnographies and histories have already been written about it.1 Also unlike most cities large and small, the District has its own Department of Corrections , making analysis of incarceration rates, demographic data, and so on far easier than would have been the case elsewhere. And, not unimportantly, as our nation’s capital city it is uniquely familiar to many of the nation’s lawmakers and the millions of tourists who visit each year, lending it a ready familiarity. The inmates in this study were housed in a mix of municipal facilities in and around the District, in privately run facilities both in the District and in several other states, and in federal facilities in other states. This mix helped me to understand which aspects of incarceration were speci‹c to the District and which were not. Nearly all the families in this study lived in the District or its surrounding suburbs. I began my research in a manner typical of ethnographic inquiries, asking if friends and contacts could introduce me to other people, then asking each new participant to introduce me to someone new. This is an easy way to get a study going, as it spreads through trusted relationships . However, it has the disadvantage of being self-selecting in ways that are impossible to predict for just this reason. To address this potential problem, once I felt I understood the major concerns of the twenty families in my “snowball sample,” I selected another thirty families using a strati‹ed random sample of the population of the Department of Corrections. Incarcerated family members were approached and asked if they would be interested in the study and whether they would provide contact information for family members. Only two of the thirty declined to participate. All the inmates who participated listed the District as their place of residence; some family members, however, lived in the surrounding suburbs. District inmates who were interviewed were located in one of the following facilities: the D.C. Jail, located in Southeast Washington; the Correctional Treatment Facility, privately operated by the CCA adjacent to the D.C. Jail; the Lorton Correctional Facilities, located twenty minutes west of the District in Lorton, Virginia; the Sussex II facility, located two hours south of the District in Sussex, Virginia; the Red Onion facility, located six hours southwest of the District in Pound, Virginia; and the Youngstown Correctional Facility, operated by the CCA in Youngstown, Ohio. The quotations are, for the most part, taken from the over two hundred recorded interviews I conducted with participants. Interviews were conducted over the course of three years starting in 1998. Most interviews were conducted either in the home of the person I interviewed or, for most inmates, in a private visiting room designed for legal consultations. Most interviews were audio recorded, but for various reasons some were not. The largest number of interviews not audio recorded were conducted in facilities managed by the Virginia Department of Corrections, which declined to authorize the use of a recording device for this study. In other rare instances, I found an unexpected opportunity for an interview and did not have a recording device handy Appendix 228 or, the lament of interviewers everywhere, my batteries ran out. In these instances I recorded the interview by hand, with detailed notes. I have made every attempt to rely on audio-recorded conversation where possible but occasionally quote from my written notes. Transcriptions differ from the actual spoken words of the interview in three ways. First, names and other identifying...