From “Observation Dude” to “An Observational Study”: Gaining Access and Conducting Research Inside a Paramilitary Organization

Although challenges and barriers to researchers’ access are common across any number of empirical sites in socio-legal research—as suggested by the very nature of this special issue and the call for papers that generated it—it has been suggested recently that prisons and other institutions of penal confinement provide a particularly troubling case study. For instance, Loïc Wacquant argues that “the ethnography of the prison thus went into eclipse at the very moment when it was most urgently needed on both scientific and political grounds.”¹ Although the causes of the decline as understood by Wacquant transcend problems with access (principally, for Wacquant, a transition from the “maternalist (semi-) welfare state to the paternalist penal state”²), access, by all accounts, is an ongoing and significant concern. As Kimberly Jacob Arriola summarizes, “conducting research in correctional settings is extremely difficult. Inmates (and any other institutionalized population for that matter) are considered a special population deserving of additional research protections... Moreover, many correctional administrators may not see research as a priority and not want researchers ‘poking around’ for fear that they may discover something less flattering.”³

Of course, one must be careful not to overstate the paucity of research inside penal institutions,⁴ especially given that the decline was probably less severe outside the US, and given that the last half dozen or so years have marked somewhat of a renaissance of scholarship on life inside carceral facilities.⁵ Also, the partial decline should not be taken as grounds for lionizing those researchers who do gain/have gained access to prisons and jails to carry out socio-legal research. Consider the title of a recent article by Valerie Jenness and her colleagues, “Accomplishing the Difficult But Not Impossible.”⁶ Gaining access to carceral systems and institutions is challenging in that one must navigate bureaucratic, ethical, and pragmatic hurdles (including, but not limited to, those imposed by departments of corrections and researchers’ own academic institutions), but it is equally clear that it can be done, as researchers continue to conduct research in such institutions.

Building on these ideas, in this essay I ask how the manner in which scholars gain access affects how the research is carried out, what data are collected (and what are not), and (although only hinted at in this short essay) the final scholarly product. My primary contention is that there are mechanisms of social control in which both investigator and investigated are enmeshed, and elucidating these mechanisms, as Richard Sparks has suggested, is useful insofar as “the interests at stake are constitutive of the scene under investigation.”⁷ I use as a case study my own experiences conducting research inside California’s prison reception centres to understand the processes of categorization that give rise to racial segregation.⁸ I argue that access may sometimes be secured not through the combination of persistence, tenacity, and temerity that one might hypothesize to be necessary from Wacquant’s or Simon’s interpretations of what they describe as a paucity of prison scholarship, but instead through some admixture of fortuitousness, a willingness to compromise, and capitalizing on pre-existing opportunities. Conducting research inside penal facilities, as elsewhere, is a messy business, and almost always involves trade-offs and compromises; this messiness is, in turn, shaped and moulded by questions of access and how particular researchers navigate them.

Gaining Access to California’s Segregated Prison Reception Centres

In contrast to those scholars who have gained access to prisons and jails as a consequence of their reputations as well-regarded researchers or by securing employment as a prison guard,⁹ two quite different circumstances were key in shaping how I gained access. First, I was at the time (2005) a graduate student searching for a master’s-level project commensurate with my then nascent interests in (among other things) punishment, law and society, race and ethnicity, and prisons. Second, it just so happened that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) was undergoing an attempt at institutional transformation during the same period, including a...