428942

0411428942JewkesQualitative Inquiry
© The Author(s) 2011

Reprints and permission:

QIX18110.1177/107780

sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

Qualitative Inquiry

Autoethnography and Emotion as

18(1) 63­–75
© The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:

Intellectual Resources: Doing Prison sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/1077800411428942
http://qix.sagepub.com
Research Differently

Yvonne Jewkes1

Abstract
In contrast to many other social sciences, criminology has largely resisted the notion that qualitative inquiry has
autoethnographic dimensions and remained quiet on the subject of the emotional investment required of ethnographic
fieldworkers studying stigmatized and/or vulnerable “others” in settings where differential indices of power, authority,
vulnerability, and despair are felt more keenly than most. Emotion appears in criminology in discussions about public
sentiments, populist punitiveness, and the emotional motivations behind offending but rarely features as a lens through
which one might better understand the process of doing research. This article examines the state of the field, discusses the
work of a small minority of ethnographers who acknowledge the emotional content of prison studies, and tells the story
of a personal research encounter that changed the author’s methodological and theoretical orientation. It argues that a
more frank acknowledgment of the convergence of subject-object roles does not necessarily threaten the validity of social
science, or at least, “it is a threat with a corresponding gain.”

Keywords
prison, emotion, criminology, autoethnography, reflexivity, epistemology

Introduction work of a handful of researchers who do acknowledge the

This article proposes a different approach to prison ethnog-
raphy than is typically adopted in academic studies. Carolyn
Ellis (2009, p. 84) asks, “Why does social science have to
be written in a way that makes detailed lived experience
secondary to abstraction and statistical data?” Criminology
appears especially guilty in regard to abstraction and statis-
tics; our positivist roots1 and reliance on bureaucrats in
government departments for both funding and access to the
field have commonly resulted in work that neutralizes the
complex human relationships, potentially dangerous situa-
tions, and emotionally charged topics we frequently engage
with. There is an unspoken understanding that if we disclose
the emotions that underpin and inform our work, our col-
leagues will question its “validity” and perhaps even our
suitability to engage effectively in criminological research
(Drake & Harvey, 2010). So instead, where emotion is pres-
ent at all, it is, as Ellis characterizes, “simply another vari-
able to add to rational models for studying social life” (Ellis,
2009, p. 85). This article critically questions the privileging
of a methodological orientation that minimizes the signifi-
cance of emotional experience and downplays the research-
er’s internal, psychic realm and external, cultural experience
and biography. The article is broadly organized in two parts.
First, I will examine the state of the field and discuss the
emotional demands of prison ethnography, albeit to an
extent that is relatively limited compared to other fields in
the social sciences. Following this, I will reflect on my own
experience of an encounter I had with one individual whom
I interviewed as part of a study of masculinity, identity, and
power in prisons2 and who proved to be a powerful emo-
tional and intellectual resource for my subsequent work.
Autoethnography and Emotion:
The Coyness of Criminology
Much has been made of the “eclipse” of qualitative, socio-
logical prison research, particularly in the United States
(Simon, 2000; Wacquant, 2002). Although there is plenty of
evidence to suggest that its demise may have been exagger-
ated,3 even prison ethnography—while “rich” in the sense
of giving voice to prisoners and (to a much lesser extent)
prison staff—largely diminishes or sidesteps any suggestion
1
University of Leicester, UK
Corresponding Author:
Yvonne Jewkes, University of Leicester, The Friars, 152 Upper New Walk,
Leicester, LE1 7QA, UK
Email: yj25@le.ac.uk

Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015

64 Qualitative Inquiry 18(1)
of connectedness between ethnographer and participant.
Yet prison researcher Alison Liebling’s (1999) observation
that any research is usually driven by personal curiosity and
that often the particular environment and topic selected (or
stumbled upon) resonates with some conscious or uncon-
scious interest whose origins pre-date the research project
surely pertains to both quantitative and qualitative research.
It is the contention of this article that in failing to disclose
their autoethnographic roles4 and their own emotional
responses to what are frequently challenging and highly
charged emotional environments, prison scholars are doing
a disservice to those who follow them (e.g., doctoral stu-
dents) who frequently approach the field with high levels of
anxiety. In comparison to many other fields of scholarly
interest, prisons generate a high degree of curiosity for those
whose only knowledge is gained through popular media
representations. Many novices to prison research embark on
ethnography armed not only with knowledge gained from
the classic texts but also with latent ideas informed by mov-
ies, television series, and the press, which tend to offer con-
tradictory images: prisons being portrayed as either violent
and disordered hell holes or as holiday camps for pampered
inmates. These representations come to form part of our
“habitus” (Bourdieu, 1977), the basic store of knowledge
that we carry around in our heads as a result of living in a
given, mediated culture. They might be inaccurate, but they
persist in the collective imagination and, by feeding into the
novice researcher’s anticipations, they may lead to consider-
able anxieties about the prospect of entering the field. Many
not only want to “know” and “understand” but also want to
anticipate how they will “feel” when they experience a
prison environment for the first time.5
However, despite these feelings being “poignant, lasting,
and eminently sociological” (Garot, 2004, p. 736), by the
time these same researchers come to write up and publish
their findings, most appear to have forgotten the sensations
experienced at the start of the research process and have
become blasé about their experience in prison. The reasons
for their nonchalance are perhaps understandable: The most
alien of environments become familiar over time and, while
sporadic dramas can punctuate prison life, for the most part,
the rhythms and routines of penal institutions have an ordi-
nary, repetitive nature that makes them relatively easy to
become accustomed to. Furthermore, a reflexive approach is
not to everyone’s taste; some researchers are not prepared to
interrogate the significance of self in their ethnographies, not
least because such self-reflection can be a distraction from
what the research is “really about” (Crewe, 2009). More than
that, however, the academic environment arguably trains
researchers to be rational and objective, to “extract out”
emotion and not disclose feelings of anxiety, confusion, vul-
nerability, or anything of their selves. In informal conversa-
tion, all prison researchers will relate stories about moments
(or prolonged periods) of empathy, embarrassment, fear,
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
nervousness, dilemma, and so on, but they rarely admit to
these feelings in their published narratives.
With much prison scholarship being financed by the
political establishment, and “administrative” criminology
and “crime science” dominating policy agendas, the “cool
rationality” (Hubbard, Backett-Milburn, & Kemmer, 2001,
p. 119) that has informed methodology is predictable enough.
Yet prison researchers’ reluctance to publicly acknowledge
either the autobiographical elements of, or their emotional
responses to, conducting ethnographic studies in institutions
where all aspects of being are frequently raw and close to the
surface remain puzzling, especially given that many of the
“classic” ethnographic studies of imprisonment have been
written by individuals with some personal experience of the
prison, either as inmates or staff.
More broadly within the social sciences, Hochschild’s
(1983) concepts of “emotion culture” and “emotional
labour” have inspired countless studies of the ways in
which professionals (air cabin crew, debt collectors, medi-
cal staff, social workers, etc.) cope with managing their
emotions while fulfilling the demands of their jobs, and
within some academic disciplines (notably sociology and
social anthropology) many studies have been published
that acknowledge the emotional resources required of eth-
nographers. However, there remains very little literature on
the emotion work of conducting research with individuals
being processed through the criminal justice system and
little reflection on studying prisons and prisoners beyond
the practical and empirical difficulties arising from field-
work (Schlosser, 2008).
The absence of emotion in prison studies is all the more
surprising given that a sociology of emotions can be dated
back to more than half a century when Goffman (1959)
popularized the idea that emotion involves effort with his
argument that individuals’ behaviors always involve the
presentation of “self” to audiences of “others” (and also
wrote on the characteristics of “total institutions”; Goffman,
1961). Since that time there has been a burgeoning literature
devoted to emotions in qualitative research, encompassing
biological or neurological theories; symbolic interactionist
theories; ritual theories; power and status theories; stratifica-
tion theories; and exchange theories, as well as Goffmanesque
dramaturgical theories (see Turner, 2009, for a critical
overview). While different in orientation and methodology,
these approaches to the study of emotions have been
described by Turner, as the “cutting edge” of sociology
(Turner, 2009, p. 340). However, while some sociologists
and anthropologists are comfortable with the notion that
one of the essential skills of an ethnographer is learning an
emotional vocabulary—of not only interpreting but of feel-
ing the “finer shades of anger, pity, or whatever the host
population specializes in” (Beatty, 2005, p. 2)—within
studies of criminal justice feelings are commonly left as a
“residual category” (Garot, 2004, p. 737), fulfilling an
Jewkes
important confessional role in field notes but remaining pri-
vate and unpublished.
Perhaps part of the problem for some social scientists lies
in the difficulty inherent in defining “emotion.” Emotions
operate at many different levels of reality—biological, neu-
rological, behavioral, cultural, structural, and situational—
some of which will appear relevant to any given researcher
and others will have no resonance at all. Following a broadly
social constructionist line, this article is underpinned by a
view that societies reveal an emotion culture of ideologies,
norms, logics, vocabularies, and other symbolic elements
that specify what individuals are to feel in particular types of
situations and how they are to express emotions but that there
is a biological and universal basis to many emotions. In other
words, emotions are channeled by culture and structural con-
texts, but activation, experience, and expression of emotions
are connected to the human body (Garot, 2004, p. 737). It
may be precisely the corporeal, visceral quality of emotion
that is so problematic in fields like prison studies where
quantitative, government-funded research is dominant.
Bosworth et al. (2005) express the problem with more
chutzpah than most:
Criminologists tend to present their analysis of the
prison in the form of inhuman data. As a result, prison
studies have become cold, calculated, surgical. . . .
These days, most criminologists make precision cuts—
no blood—no humanity. Why? So no one will care.
Keep it statistical, inhuman, no compassion. (p. 259)
The orthodoxy is that it is our responsibility to ensure
that our research meets the standard of good scientific work:
The ethnographer must neither be in the service of
some political establishment or profession nor an
organic intellectual seeking to further the interests of
marginalised, exploited or dominated groups. Both of
these orientations greatly increase the danger of sys-
tematic bias. (Hammersley, 2005, p. 12)
To many criminologists, who pursue particular research
agendas precisely because they are drawn to marginalized,
exploited, or dominated groups, Hammersley’s position
seems absurd. Nevertheless, when it comes to writing up
their data the macho, gung-ho mentality that character-
izes much sociological prison literature (Walker &
Worrall, 2000) is a frame of mind that appears to be mir-
rored in the stance adopted by academic researchers who
rarely expose anything of themselves or their feelings in
what is a fascinating, unpredictable, and secretive envi-
ronment. While others have expressed concern about the
absence of “pain” from accounts of prison life (Liebling,
1999), equally intriguing is the absence of the researcher
as a person.
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
65
One notable exception to this reticence to acknowledge
that researcher subjectivities and positionalities can enrich
ethnographic accounts of the prison is a recent contribution
by Phillips and Earle (2010), which offers a reflexive inter-
rogation of prisoner identities and social relationships with a
particular concern for how race and ethnicity interplays
with class and gender in methodologically significant ways.
Compelled to recognize that their study of prisoner identities
could not be divorced from a reflexive engagement with
their own identities, Phillips and Earle are refreshingly can-
did about the ways in which their own biographies, identi-
ties, and memories framed the study, including, respectively,
memories of violent racism experienced as a child and time
spent serving a prison sentence as a result of “incautious
political activity” (p. 366). For the most part, however, the
“self” remains hidden in mainstream social research. Writing
about prisoners’ biographies, Sim (2004) argues that crimi-
nology’s fixation with methodology, objectivity, restrained
language, and appropriate form means it does not know what
to do with these writings. Equally, it might be argued that
these fixations discourage any form of biographical or emo-
tional intrusion by the researcher.
In other social science fields much has been written
about the blurring of professional and personal identities in
the research environment, and there has emerged a recogni-
tion that ethnography is always partly autobiographical. In
particular, psychosocial approaches highlight that the “inner
worlds” of fieldworkers structure their choice of research
setting, their experiences in the field, and the research roles
they assume (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000; Hunt, 1989).
Feminist literature has also emphasized that drawing on and
theorizing about one’s personal experience can be valuable
to the research process (Oakley, 1981). In subjects where
psychosocial and feminist perspectives have gained ground,
then, researcher subjectivity is recognized as a valuable
resource that affects every aspect of the research process
from choice of project to presentation of “findings” whether
consciously or unconsciously so.
In some areas of criminology, too, there has been a grow-
ing recognition that the research process is an inherently
personal, political, and partial endeavor. Ferrell (1998)
argues that we must
reintroduce the humanity of the researcher into the
research process and make a case for critical, reflexive,
autobiographical accounts and understandings—for
“profound self-disclosures” and openness to the
“subjective experience of doing research”—as part of
the field research process. (p. 24)
Writing about police work from a feminist-psychoana-
lytic perspective, Hunt (1989) similarly argues that subjec-
tivity and the self always intrude in research, to the extent
where “fieldwork is, in part, the discovery of the self
66 Qualitative Inquiry 18(1)
through the detour of the other” (p. 42). “Breaking the
silence” about personal motivations for doing prison
research and reflecting on what particular features of the
prison draw the curious in, Liebling (1999) says,
They indicate much about us as well as the prison:
confinement, authority, power, control, injustice, vio-
lence, relationship, hope, pain and sadness. Both
extremes of human nature—its capacity for good and
evil—are present in prison in perhaps their starkest
form. . . . A curiosity about the human spirit and the
institutions we create, and a concern that its better
side be nurtured, however challenging the odds, may
drive our research lives. (pp. 151-152)
Ironically, while criminological researchers have tradi-
tionally underplayed their own emotions, recently there has
been a vogue for writing about the emotional textures of
offending and victimization, perhaps partly reflecting trends
elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences where theo-
ries of emotions—and, indeed the establishment of a distinct
“sociology of emotions”—have surfaced in recent years
(see Turner, 2009, for an overview). In relation to offend-
ing, the new currency of emotion reflects the schism
between “rational choice” or “situational” criminologies
and the emergent (though now established) field of cultural
criminology, wherein Katz (1988), Ferrell (1999), and others
have rounded on what they see as the utilitarian, disembod-
ied, and bloodless approach adopted by these perspectives
and sought instead to highlight the expressive, emotional,
and sensual nature of much offending behavior (Yar, 2009).
At the same time, the emotionalization of public discourse
about crime and criminal justice and the introduction of
sanctions within the criminal justice system that are explic-
itly based on, or designed to arouse, emotions (a combined
set of processes that are captured by the term “populist puni-
tiveness”) have resulted in a “return of emotions” to criminal
justice, penal policy, and the law (Karstedt, 2002, p. 301).
Nonetheless, the vast majority of prison research remains
curiously immune from these influences and, while cultural
criminology has sought to understand the “sneaky thrills”
(Katz, 1988, p. 52) inherent in much criminality, there have
been few attempts by criminologists to account for why they
do research, what their conscious or unconscious motiva-
tions might be, and how they feel both while carrying out
the research and afterwards. It is as if fear of exposure as
an emotional human being, capable of compassion and
empathy with respondents or, indeed, excitement about the
research process (which surely invariably has sneaky
thrills of its own), will undermine their findings or create
what appears as “soft” research.
In the rare instances where the emotional dynamics of
research are acknowledged, they are usually conceptualized
as negative, draining emotions (distress, danger, risk, etc.)
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
and the dominant themes appear to be “getting upset,”
“becoming angry,” or “overempathizing.” For example, Mary
Bosworth (1999) describes her study of resistance, agency,
and power in women’s prisons as politically rather than meth-
odologically driven, but entering the field of research with a
highly politicized feminist agenda led to a blurring of the per-
sonal and the political, and Bosworth narrates how overem-
pathizing with her female prisoner respondents had dire
consequences for her health. Alison Liebling (1999) describes
her research team’s response to a particularly exhausting eth-
nographic experience during which they were tempted to
“drink and smoke more than usual, listen to extra loud
music, drive too fast and resort to other stress-related behav-
iours, to let off steam” (p. 150). Julie Mills (2004) describes
conducting fieldwork among male sex offenders and being
greeted one day by a large group of men who shouted, wolf
whistled, and subjected her to sexual innuendo. She admits
to feeling overwhelmed and terrified, not so much by their
jibes as by the sheer noise they made. Laura Piacentini
(2004) recalls feeling “exposed and vulnerable” as she “per-
formed” for a poetry-loving governor or acquiesced to the
command that she wear make-up because he “liked that”
(p. 21), and her gruesome tales of failing health, poor diet,
and getting a large tick bite on her scalp, go some way to
conveying what it was actually like to be deeply immersed in
the Russian penal system. All these examples illustrate that
prison research can be emotive, affecting, and harrowing.
On the other hand, encounters in prison can be positive
and unusually life-affirming experiences. Much is made of
“rapport” in the research methods literature and, while the
existence of rapport does not imply any sort of bond or
affection between people, it does involve mutual respect
(Spradley, 1979). However, most novice prison researchers
are surprised by how unfailingly, candidly, honest both pris-
oners and prison staff can be, and bonds can form during
the process of data gathering and in the sharing of personal
stories. Over the years that I have researched in prisons,
several respondents have disclosed to me things they had
never told anyone before and given me poems or papers
they have written and articles about prison that they thought
might help with my work. Some have shown me photo-
graphs of, or letters from, their loved ones; others have
shown me lovingly crafted models made from matchsticks
or works of art they have created. Many have shared with
me personal and intimate stories and memories from their
lives before prison. Some have cried before me; several
have got angry as they have recounted what they view as
grave injustices; a few have asked me to help them (e.g., by
putting their case for release on temporary leave to a prison
officer or governor). Such experiences are not uncommon;
prison ethnographies frequently yield information of a
deeply personal nature and, sometimes, rapport may be
superseded by genuine, if very transitory, friendship, as
prisoner respondents seek to make emotional, experiential,
Jewkes
and intellectual connections with the researcher. However,
the researcher is inevitably faced with the problem of know-
ing what to do with these personal, intimate exchanges
because they challenge the “usual criminological obsession
with data, objectivity, and generalizability” (Bosworth
et al., 2005, p. 254). Moreover, for the most part, the
researcher’s own emotional response to what may be
breathtakingly frank disclosures goes unrevealed.
Insiders and Outsiders
The personal experiences described above bring into sharp
relief the insider–outsider dichotomy. Another example,
common in the prisons literature, is that of the good-hearted
nicknames assigned to fieldworkers by prisoners, which
may also signify the passage between stranger and famil-
iar acquaintance or “outsider” and (partial) “insider.” For
example, Sparks and Hay recount how they became known
by their respondents as “Pinky and Perky,” “Bill and Ben,”
or “The Dynamic Duo” after Batman and Robin (Sparks,
Bottoms, & Hay, 1996), while King and McDermott became
“Dempsey and Makepeace” during their prison research
(King, 2000). At one prison where I spent several weeks
conducting ethnographic fieldwork, I became regarded by
the prisoners as “one of them” (or even as “one of the lads”
as one prison respondent expressed it) as opposed to the
more ambiguous “one of them” referring to all those with
officially sanctioned power over prisoners (Jewkes, 2002).
In this way, then, an element of autoethnography is inevi-
table for, although usually applied to research conducted
by someone with “insider” status, it is not restricted to
“natives,” in the anthropological sense. As an early pio-
neer of autoethnography, David Hayano (1979) notes a
researcher may acquire, through close acquaintance with a
group, the perspective of “insider” with a group or individ-
ual with whom he or she identifies.
Defining “insider” and “outsider” status is complex as the
categories can be fluid or asymmetrical, and rigid adher-
ence to binary classifications or homogeneity within subject
positions can lead to accusations of essentialism (Merton,
1972; Phillips & Earle, 2010). In the prison context, research-
ers frequently have to position themselves (physically and
ideologically) between officers and prisoners, which can be
detrimental to the building of trust and rapport with both
“sides.” Indeed, so emphatically drawn are the lines of
demarcation between officers and prisoners that many prison
researchers devise strategies for distancing themselves from
the discursive and symbolic practices of the prison staff
when with inmate respondents and vice versa. Wearing
clothing that cannot be semiotically construed as any kind
of uniform (a suit can be “read” in terms of its signification
of power and status) when interviewing prisoners is one
example; debating the line between “attractive” and “pro-
vocative” in the length of a skirt after taking (or ignoring)
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
67
advice from staff is another (Genders & Player, 1995; Mills,
2004). Reflecting on her presentation of self through cloth-
ing while interviewing offenders, police, and solicitors,
Adams concludes that “dressing” for interviews (either
“up” or “down”) raised doubts in her own mind about her
authenticity and integrity, as she feared presenting an
“unreal” or “false” self (Adams, 2000, p. 391).
Refusing the offer of keys, using prison slang when
appropriate, and making clear to participants at the outset of
each interview that one is a university researcher with no
particular agenda, political or otherwise, are additional
ways in which researchers commonly attempt to minimize
their differential access to power and resources in relation
to prisoner respondents. Jacobs (1977) notes that part of his
presentation of self as a student researcher at Stateville
Penitentiary, independent of any formal structures of power,
was to sport a beard; a tactic which is clearly only available
to male researchers! Such strategies hint at the ways in
which subject positions are relational, contingent, and con-
tinually being formed and reformed in research. Coretta
Philips records an experience in a prison when her identity
as a “black/mixed race woman with ‘loxed’ hair” elicited a
“look of hostile incomprehension” on a White female prison
administrator’s face and resulted in a tendency for prison
officers to primarily address the White, male, but junior,
member of the research team (Phillips & Earle, 2010, p.
366). Phillips’ experiences underline the importance of race
and its intersections with class and gender, not least because
they give lie to the notion that female researchers are often at
an advantage in male-dominated “public” spaces. It has been
suggested that women in the field draw “hardly a glance
from males engaged on more important business” (Warren,
1988, p. 18) or are simply perceived as “harmless” by men,
to the extent that they may be afforded access to areas of the
prison and to information and confidential reports on indi-
vidual prisoners, which arguably “border[s] on trespass”
(Warren, 1988, p. 18). However, Phillips’ account illustrates
that the ways in which gender, class, race and ethnicity, age,
and physical appearance intersect and are perceived by oth-
ers may not only frame the fieldworker’s initial reception
into the field but may also affect the ongoing research
process.
The frequent references in prison scholarship to an
underlying gender dynamic when discussing the familiar
dilemmas of dress, carrying keys, and being “taken seri-
ously” underline the intensity of the fieldwork process and
the extent to which ethnography may be accompanied by a
psychological anxiety that demands a continuous manage-
ment of self when in the presence of those studied (Shaffir,
Stebbins, & Turowetz, 1980). In a psychoanalytic interpre-
tation, the researcher–respondent relationship is mediated
by the consciousness, culture, and experience of each par-
ticipant so that, regardless of the researcher’s actual status,
“subjects” transfer onto them definitions and images that
68 Qualitative Inquiry 18(1)
belong to their own culture and psychic experience and thus
“are often blind to who the researchers are and what they
are actually doing, favouring their own fantasies and notions
about them” (Hunt, 1989, p. 20). At a superficial level the
prison researcher’s identities might include those of doc-
toral student or established academic (or others, including
tutor, conference speaker, or prison “tourist”), all of which
might be defined as “outsider” identities. But at a more per-
sonal level, individual participants in prison research may
assign to the researcher a number of different identities on
the basis of their notions of professional status, social power,
ethnicity, class, gender, age, and—particularly in relation to
female researchers—marital status, physical appearance,
and sexual dynamics. Phillips (2010) notes that aspects of
shared identity with a male prisoner respondent (primarily,
ethnicity) were cancelled out by positioning her as a sexual-
ized gender subject and insistence in regarding the inter-
view as “more of a date” (p. 367). Elsewhere I have noted
an occasion when a prisoner who described himself as a
“romantic” and a “musician” followed up an interview by
returning with a guitar under each arm, intent on serenad-
ing me, only to be bundled back to his cell by two prison
officers (Jewkes, 2002). Such constructed formulations
may serve to further enhance a sense of difference between
researcher and respondent and underline their respective
insider and outsider statuses.
It may come as no surprise to note that nearly all the
fieldworkers mentioned so far in this article are women, and
their disclosures about their experiences and emotions
while conducting fieldwork in prisons might be thought of
as “(stereo)typically” female. However, most prison studies
remain surprisingly ungendered texts. While female prison
officers working in men’s prisons and male officers in
women’s prisons are both now commonplace and while
prisons open their doors to a vast range of men and women
in many professional capacities, the experience of being a
female researcher in a men’s prison or a male researcher in
a women’s prison6 still brings with it a set of dynamics that
I would expect to be worthy of a great deal more comment
(which is not to say that men researching in male prisons
and women studying female prisons do not give rise to fas-
cinating issues and dilemmas of their own). Warren notes
that “finding a place” within a strange culture can be espe-
cially tricky for the female ethnographer because not only
does she have to conform to assumptions about women
being unchallenging and compliant but she must also be
seen to be operating successfully in a male-dominated pub-
lic sphere. This frequently involves constructing a “liminal”
or androgynous identity, as Hunt describes in her research
of police culture:
[I had to] convince police subjects that I was a trustwor-
thy person who could conduct honest research. . . . I had
to negotiate a gender identity that combined elements
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
of masculine trustworthiness with feminine honesty. I
therefore became a “liminal” person who dwelled
between two opposing realms of the policeman’s sym-
bolic world. (Hunt, 1989, p. 286)
One exception to the usual pattern of gendered disclosure is
Richard Sparks’ (2002) reflections on his fieldwork experi-
ences in Barlinnie Special Unit in Scotland in the 1990s,
which he describes as “marginally and unintentionally
implicated in a decision to close the Special Unit”7 (p. 556).
In a raw, reflexive account, Sparks talks of his unease and
discomfort as his position as observer, recorder, and mar-
ginal participant became increasingly untenable and
recounts how the allegations of credulity and naivety he
laid against himself proved paralyzing to his attempts to
write up his fieldwork (p. 578):
Self-absorption . . . seems ethically dubious and of
peripheral relevance, and is anyway usually a failure
of good taste. Nevertheless I was there; and it would
be too simple, and too consoling, to pretend that my
being there was of no consequence at all. Far from
rushing into confessional disclosure, for too long my
own unease about the viability of my role has inhib-
ited me from public discussion of these matters but
such reticence needs eventually to be put aside. . . .
Suffice to note that if we wish to claim some civic
and intellectual importance for first-hand observa-
tional research in prisons we may also need to accept
that there is no entirely innocuous position from
which we speak. (p. 558)
Given the hegemonic masculine agenda and positivist
tradition that underpins much work in this area, it might be
regarded as particularly courageous for Sparks to admit to
such feelings and to confess that he harbored them for a con-
siderable period, before eventually putting them to paper.
Implicit in Sparks’ reflections is that emotion has episte-
mological significance; indeed several scholars go so far as
to suggest that we can only “know” through our emotions
and should not simply rely on our cognition and intellect
(Hubbard et al., 2001). Knowledge, then, is not something
objective and removed from our own bodies, experiences,
and emotions but is created through our experiences of the
world as a sensuous and affective activity. Like respon-
dents, we as researchers bring to the field our own biogra-
phies, and our relationship to what our respondents tell us
will affect both the interview dynamics and how we make
sense of their account. We thus need to understand our own
research activities as “telling ourselves a story about our-
selves” (Steier, 1991, p. 3). Of course, this has to be man-
aged carefully; as Sparks intimates, reflexivity can appear
self-indulgent and there is a danger that the ethnographer
privileges his or her own voice above those of the research
Jewkes
participants or becomes fixated on what Phillips and Earle
describe as an “infinite, narcissistic regress of self-
conscious self-interrogations” (p. 362). Following Bourdieu,
they comment that, for them, the attraction of reflexivity lies
“not in confessional or testimonial exhortation” (Phillips &
Earle, 2010, p. 363) but in its capacity to acknowledge
researchers as active participants whose identities and biog-
raphies influence and inform their understandings of their
research. This does not mean that the researcher is autho-
rized to claim some “quasi-divine” viewpoint (Phillips &
Earle, 2010, p. 363; see also Bourdieu, 1999, p. 3).
Emotion as Intellectual Resource:
Some Personal Reflections
While introspection, anxiety, vulnerability, and trauma are
present—if generally downplayed—in much prison
research, positive emotional experiences are equally under-
discussed. As previously noted, the fact that prison research
can be an ordeal has been documented by a handful of,
mostly female, ethnographers. But prisons can also be
stimulating, exhilarating, and curiously life-affirming envi-
ronments in which to do qualitative research, and emotional
identification with prisoners and prison staff, like all
research participants, is often a positive and powerful stimu-
lus in the formulation of knowledge. To acknowledge this
publicly, however, may be to court the disapproval of one’s
peers, as not only do such statements do nothing to chal-
lenge the institution of the prison itself but also imply that
prisons are not unremittingly negative, painful environ-
ments. Yet reflexively informed prison ethnography is a
vital counterpoint both to the positivist, quantitative agenda
of government research agencies and to the growing popu-
larity of prison tourism whereby the “researcher” is escorted
on heavily scripted carceral tours by the prison governor or
other authority (Piché & Walby, 2010). In these cases (and
I have been a participant on such visits myself) the impres-
sion of an “outsider” looking in is most striking, and the
failure to acknowledge the degree to which our own identi-
ties and different social positions inform the research pro-
cess and subsequent publications can seem, at best, naïve
and, at worst, dishonest.
So how can we explore and use emotions that are felt so
personally within an academic discipline that requires us to
structure our communication in such a way that does not
disempower us intellectually and in such a way that enables
others to make sense of it? In 2006, I presented a paper at
the Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, which
addressed these questions and argued that a chance meeting
with a single research participant became not only a source
of emotional and empathetic identification but also an
invaluable intellectual resource over the course of the fol-
lowing decade. The audience was broadly divided along
gender and discipline lines with around half being female
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
69
criminology students and the remainder mostly male law
students. The paper generated heated discussion, with sev-
eral of the women warmly thanking me for speaking to their
own experiences and giving value to what might be under-
stood as the “normal” human emotions they felt when doing
fieldwork in prisons. The male lawyers, however, did not
“get it” at all8 and felt aggrieved that I appeared to be speak-
ing up for offender rights and had said nothing about vic-
tims” rights.9 One man accused me of being a “woolly
criminologist,” by which I took him to mean a woolly female
criminologist. I cannot be sure, but perhaps their hostility
accounts for the 5-year gap before I decided to put this arti-
cle in the public realm. Like Sparks (2002), I found that the
interweaving of biography, experience, and fieldwork—and
the potential for criticism for my actions and nonactions—
proved paralyzing.
A detour into the story of the individual who came to
have such an influence on my work is unavoidable. When I
interviewed him at HMP Ashwell (a low-security prison in
the English midlands) in April 1999 Harry Roberts was then
in his 33rd year in prison. Despite being a well-known fig-
ure in British criminal history10 (largely by virtue of the
offence he committed; the murder of three police officers in
West London in August 1966) I knew nothing about him,
but we spent a pleasant and uninterrupted two-and-a-half
hours in conversation. His appearance and manner belied
his three decades in prison; he was animated, humorous,
and forthcoming, as illustrated by his confession that he
sometimes found himself “running around after the girls as
if I were still thirty years old.” Having spent several decades
inside, the passage of time has stultified his awareness of
his growing maturity: “I haven’t got a day older since being
in prison. I’m still thirty. I forget that I’m really sixty-odd. I
wonder why I’m not getting anywhere with the female
screws and then I look in the mirror and of course get a
shock” (Jewkes, 2002, p. 114). His long stretch inside had,
however, made him cynical about the aspects of prison life
that render inmates indistinguishable from one another:
“The prison officers see us as numbers. We’re just a wage
packet to them. They’ve lost sight of us as people” (Jewkes,
2002, p. 177). His honesty made me warm to him and I left
the prison that afternoon feeling genuinely uplifted for the
reason (as I now understand it) that the stories we shared
integrated my life and work and connected my life with that
of another (see Ellis, 2009, p. 14).
Some 18 months later, I was surprised to read in the
Guardian newspaper that he was one of 23 prisoners serv-
ing a “natural life” tariff, a report that turned out to be inac-
curate, although the thrust of the message—that he would
spend the rest of his natural life in prison—is the most likely
outcome. My surprise stemmed from the fact that when I
met him, he was 3 years beyond the 30-year tariff set by the
trial judge in 1966 and was being prepared for release: He had
progressed downwards through the security categorizations,
70 Qualitative Inquiry 18(1)
was looking forward to being transferred to an open prison,
and had been escorted on several outside visits to acclima-
tize him to a world that had changed significantly since he
last experienced it more than three decades earlier. Although
the Guardian report was erroneous, then Home Secretary,
Jack Straw, had for 7 months failed to act on a recommen-
dation by the Parole Board in 1997 that he should be trans-
ferred to an open prison while he took legal advice as to
whether he could increase the tariff to “whole life” (equiva-
lent to LWOP); a move that he was advised would be
unlawful.
The details of the case and the ongoing legal conflict
between Roberts and the British government are too com-
plex to be detailed here. Suffice to say that shortly after I
interviewed him in 1999, Straw finally accepted a Parole
Board recommendation that he should be moved to a minimum-
security prison and he was duly transferred to a Category D
open prison. However, this move was short-lived due to a
number of unfounded allegations made against him (by an
anonymous fellow prisoner) that were so “sensitive” they
could not be disclosed to either himself or his solicitor, and
therefore, a “special advocate” was to be appointed to rep-
resent his interests at his Parole Board hearing. In July 2004
the Court of Appeal upheld the Parole Board’s adoption of
the Specially Appointed Advocate (SAA) procedure in
order to protect its sources, thus authorizing lawyers repre-
senting the Home Secretary to use the secret evidence to
argue against release. The case then went to the House of
Lords who voted by a margin of 3 to 2 to uphold the power
of the Parole Board, at the request of the Home Secretary,
and not to reveal the “sensitive material” that had been
given by the informer who wished to remain anonymous.
The evidence was again not released to the defendant’s law-
yers and the Specially Appointed Advocate could not take
instructions on it, thus severely hampering the representa-
tion of the applicant in those aspects of the board’s hearing
involving that material. As van Zyl Smit (2007) comments,
the use of a highly restrictive procedure that had previously
been used only in cases involving the security of the state in
an “ordinary” criminal matter without primary legislative
authority is troubling, especially as it underlines that liberty
interests of a potential parolee, even one who has served the
minimum period, are not given the same weight as those of
someone accused of a criminal offence.
As indicated earlier, this article is predicated on the
belief that much academic research is driven by forces
beyond mere interest or curiosity, even if the underlying
motivations for pursuing a particular area of interest are
rarely revealed. For me, the case briefly sketched above
and, more important, my emotional response to the indi-
vidual at the centre of it, resonated in several ways that
came to shape my intellectual development. The fact that
Roberts was absent from media reports for 30 years from
1973 (when his mother was put on trial for aiding an escape
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
attempt by taking bolt-cutters into Parkhurst prison, an
offence she was ultimately cleared of) until July 2003, when
the Times reported that he was starting proceedings against
the Parole Board, motivated me to write about the iconic
status accorded to certain criminals who have come to
occupy a powerfully symbolic place in the collective psyche,
while others fail to register on the media radar, still less
capture the collective imagination (Jewkes, 2004/2010). It
led me to interrogate the so-called “punitive turn” that we
are witnessing in many Western societies and to question
how “new” the new punitiveness actually is (Jewkes, 2006).
Roberts also inspired me to argue, in a paper about the legit-
imacy of indeterminate sentencing, that, for those prisoners
detained indefinitely, loss of control over significant life
events thwarts taken-for-granted assumptions about the
lifecourse in ways that are comparable to the experience of
chronic or terminal illness (Jewkes, 2005). In that piece I
refer briefly to the case and note that Harry’s story has
“haunted” me; a strong word, but reminiscent of Hollway and
Jefferson’s (2000) admission that after being immersed in a
respondent’s story they would feel “inhabited” by that per-
son “in the sense that our imagination was full of him or her”
(p. 69). To clarify, then, while I had previously developed an
intellectual orientation toward the issues that commonly
drive prison ethnography—power, control, injustice, vio-
lence, hope, hopelessness, pain, and suffering—my chance
meeting with this single individual was a powerful drive in
seeking further knowledge and, I believe, resulted in the
formulation of richer and more nuanced knowledge about
these aspects of the lived experience of imprisonment and a
keener interest in the retributive nature of the criminal jus-
tice system and some of its key actors.
In a psychosocial interpretation, it would be reasonable
to suggest that my own biography elicited a sympathetic
relation to his story that Harry would have felt safe in the
telling of (Hollway & Jefferson, 2000). His crime was com-
mitted 12 days after I was born, and he was sentenced 3
months later. The stories he related to me—his recollections
of leaving court in a black Mariah with police motorcycle
escorts in tin helmets and garters, making a slow procession
through crowds of football fans on their way to the match,
his prison associations (recounted with a tinge of pride)
with notorious criminals such as the Krays—and the photo-
graphs of the murder scene that accompanied newspaper
reports at the time (showing the Standard Vanguard van
driven by Witney and the unmarked police car, against a
backdrop of back-to-back terraced houses), all depict the
world into which I was born. They provide a snapshot of the
summer of 1966 and, reading the newspapers of the day,
Roberts’ crime and punishment seem peculiarly of their
time. The murder of three policemen so soon after the aboli-
tion of the death penalty chilled a public still basking in the
warm glow of victory after winning the soccer World Cup a
fortnight earlier. As he told me about his years of incarceration
Jewkes
he was recalling my entire life, albeit from the peculiar
position of having been shut out from it. He in turn asked
me about my perceptions of the previous three decades, and
we discussed at length some of the social barometers that
we use to measure the passing of time. During our conver-
sation we also marveled at the punitiveness of a judicial
system that could keep someone confined for as long as I’d
been alive—in fact, he seemed rather amused by the idea.
His story was brought up-to-date with his observations of
life on the outside; in preparation for release (that did not in
the end happen) he was being taken on escorted visits to the
city in which I was brought up and where my family still
live. In a further coincidence, I discovered that one of my
academic colleagues is the father of Roberts’ solicitor. All
these points of identification to some extent bridged our
more obvious differences.
During and immediately after our encounter I felt an
emotional connection that I had not (and since have not)
experienced with other prisoner respondents. Since then,
my feelings of empathy toward him as an individual, and
my emotional responses—including dismay, disbelief, and
outrage—to the fact that he is still in prison, 45 years after
he was sentenced and 15 years after his tariff expired, have
only intensified with each secret hearing, failed appeal, and
salacious news story that have characterized his ongoing
battle with the British government.
There is, of course, no place for hot-headedness in aca-
demic writing, but an emotional response does not equate to
a lack of reason or cognition. As Katz observes, emotions are
best understood as “movements from an unselfconscious
being-in-the-world to relatively more self-reflective pos-
tures,” and close description of what happens when people
(including, I suggest, us as researchers) “laugh, cry, get
angry, or are ashamed to show that emotions are not, as they
have almost always been understood, in tension with
thought, reason, or strategic self-examination” (Katz, 2002,
p. 260). In a similar vein, Yar has suggested that we should
understand emotions as reasonable—and hence rational—
subjective judgments about objective experiential worlds.
In this way, he says, we may understand actions as based on
“emotional reasons” and “reasonable emotions,” rather than
confining emotions to the realm of the irrational or ara-
tional. Emotions may be, he says, “different in form from
those processes of inference and judgement that find an
explicit articulation in linguistic symbolism, but are the
same in kind” (Yar, 2009, p. 8).
But while support exists for the view that emotions are
more reasonable and rational than often characterized in
criminological discussion,11 nonetheless, there remain a
number of potential obstacles that acknowledging emotional
identification can present to honest, “truthful” research—and
to getting it published. Reflecting on Roberts’ story and my
relationship to it, I’m presented with the difficulty of repre-
senting “reality.” On a straightforward, conscious level, this
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
71
is a complex legal case—only the briefest of details of which
have been sketched here—and in which much of the detail
remains opaque. On a less straightforward, unconscious
level, my emotional identification with this individual
might hinder my attempt to represent a “reality” that may be
challenging or uncomfortable. Unconscious sources of
unruliness are not always available to our conscious minds,
and there may be unrecognized processes of transference
and countertransference at work. My father had died (pre-
maturely, at the age of 54) a few weeks before I met Harry
Roberts and the latter’s evocative recollections of the 1960s
no doubt touched a nerve that Freudian scholars might char-
acterize as the co-relation and co-habitation of the thanatic
(death) and erotic (life) instincts (Yar, 2009).
Aside from mainstream criminology’s antipathy to
engaging with that which is not easily measurable or quan-
tifiable about human action, there are further barriers to
publicly acknowledging the emotionally rooted motivations
for pursuing particular paths of epistemological enquiry, not
least the thorny question of how we acknowledge the inevi-
tability of the personal and political while achieving what is
“ethical” and responsible. Is it simply a question of decid-
ing whose side we are on (Becker, 1967; Hammersley,
2005; Liebling, 2001) or should we always attempt to rep-
resent all sides of a story and stick to the “facts”? Could
I—should I—do more to draw attention to Roberts” case? I
could have taken on the role of advocate: I might have con-
tacted Amnesty International, Liberty, and other organiza-
tions that campaign on behalf of prisoners; I could have
lobbied politicians or written an article for the Guardian, but
I’ve done none of these things. Is my reticence driven by a
fear that to do so would, in some way, “contaminate” my
research? Liebling reminds us that any research takes place
within a political landscape in which there may be numer-
ous minefields, and this case would appear to have more
political consequences than most. But is my diffidence sim-
ply adding to the “failures of criminology” (Cohen, 1988,
pp. 51-52; Sim, 2004).
A further complexity, which may account for the delay in
the writing of this article, is the desire to avoid charges of
exploitation (see Ellis, 2009, p. 308, for a discussion).
Could I be accused of cynically exploiting Harry Roberts’
case for the sake of my career? While Oakley (1981) sug-
gests that a “shared position” can foster mutual recognition
and egalitarian interactions, Finch (1984) argues that when
interviewers assume commonalities and identification in
the context of power-laden differences (which include, in
the case of myself and Roberts, gender, age, social class,
and occupation, as well as the obvious difference in our
relation to the prison environment and all its attendant
meanings) they are liable to reproduce structures of oppres-
sion and exploitation. It would be hard for me to deny that
my attempts to build rapport and gain his trust were under-
pinned by the instrumental purpose of persuading him to
72 Qualitative Inquiry 18(1)
provide me with research data. While I have subsequently
sought to represent his story in the sense of bringing it to the
attention of an interested and informed audience, I may be
deluding myself that I am able to represent any individual
research participant and may face criticism for “going
native” or overromanticizing a folk hero/folk devil.
Conclusion
As described earlier, this article originated with a recogni-
tion that doctoral students and novice prison researchers
frequently experience considerable anxiety about entering
the field and particularly about observing and interviewing
prisoners. I have argued that a more honest and reflexive
approach to qualitative prison research would provide a
benchmark for others trying to process their experiences
and feelings about the research they undertake (Ellis, 2009,
p. 230). Ellis describes autoethnography as “a social project
that helps us understand a larger relational, communal and
political world of which we are a part and that moves us to
critical engagement, social action, and social change” (Ellis,
2009, p. 229). Good autoethnography, she goes on, “works
toward a communitas, where we might speak together of
our experiences, find commonality of spirit, companionship
. . . and solace (p. 229). While research is inevitably an
intensely personal and highly individualized experience, the
accounts of others can aid our understanding of the pro-
cesses, pleasures, and pitfalls of qualitative inquiry, particu-
larly if they reveal something of the self. As Coles (1989)
says, “A good story is one that others can take in and use for
themselves” (p. 22; cited in Ellis, 2009, p. 230).
I have further suggested that an acknowledgment that
subjective experience and emotional responsiveness can
play a role in the formulation of knowledge would deepen
our understanding of the people and contexts we study. In
this article I have recounted a story in which the empathy
and identification I experienced with a single respondent
acted as a catalyst for my personal quest for knowledge.
Ironically, my meeting with Harry Roberts took place at a
time of hope; he firmly believed that he would soon be a
free man, and his humor and optimism were reflected in the
interview data. Now, more than 11 years later and embattled
by an ongoing legal case that he has reportedly described as
“just like Guantanamo Bay,” I imagine that, if he agreed to
be interviewed by a university researcher at all, his responses
and demeanor would be very different.12 For me, Harry
Roberts’ story underlines the fact that objectivity and bal-
ance may not only be impossible and impractical goals in
prison ethnography but may also be undesirable if these
qualities neutralize important potential issues and lead to
what Sim (2004) has described as “theoretical reductionism
and political timidity” (p. 113).
Ellis writes that she has violated many taken-for-granted
notions in social science research: writing in the first person
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
(thus infringing upon the separation of subject and
researcher), writing about a single case, telling a story that
“fractured the boundaries that normally separate social sci-
ence from literature; and disclosing normally hidden details
of private life” (privileging emotional experience over the
“rational actor model of social performance”; Ellis, 2009, pp.
105-106). All these violations mirror my own and account
for my uneasiness about publishing. Yet Bosworth et al.
(2005, p. 259) note that criminology’s failure to discuss the
extent to which “most prisoners conceal a tumult of
unplumbed anger, frustration, fear, and outrage at their
imprisonment” undermines our ability to effectively cri-
tique the penal system. Similarly, I would argue that the
extracting out of emotion and humanity from the research
process and the pervasive failure of researchers to own up
to empathetic feelings of anger, frustration, fear, and out-
rage (among others) may, at the very least, represent a missed
opportunity to enrich the analysis. If we can succeed in
retaining epistemological and theoretical rigor while at the
same time “confessing” to feelings of emotional investment
do we not produce more interesting and honest knowledge?
All these dynamics are surely worth interrogating in our
research endeavors.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
Funding
The author declared the following financial support for the
research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author
gratefully acknowledges the research support of the College of
Social Sciences, University of Leicester.
Notes
1. Criminology began as a scientific discipline with Cesare
Lombroso’s pseudo-Darwinian theories of the “born crimi-
nal,” a result of the experiments he carried out on the bodies
of prisoners.
2. Jewkes, Y. (2002). Captive Audience: Media, Masculinity and
Power in Prisons. Cullompton, UK: Willan.
3. See, for example, the forthcoming special issue of Punishment
& Society, 13(4), on “The Pains of Imprisonment Revisited.”
4. “Autoethnography” is an approach that has been used for at
least three decades by literary critics and has more recently
been appropriated by cultural anthropologists who are
explicit in their exploration of links between their own biog-
raphies or life experiences and their ethnographic practices
(Denzin, 1989; Ellis, 2009; Okely & Callaway, 1992; Reed-
Danahay, 1997).
5. These observations are based on my supervision of many PhD
students who frequently ask questions, not only about how
they should dress, act, respond to prisoners and staff, and so
Jewkes
on, but also about what they should expect to feel, what they
should do if they become anxious, and so on. Of course, it is
not just students (and, for that matter, established academics)
who regard going into prisons with trepidation. A prisoner at
a maximum-security prison once said to me, “I came into
prison with ideas based on what I’d seen in films—all male
rape and ‘don’t bend down in the showers.’ I was terrified”
(field notes, May 9, 1998). Studies of prison staff also illus-
trate the nervousness and fear experienced by many new
recruits (Arnold, 2009; Crawley, 2006).
6. The vast majority of ethnographic prison research is con-
ducted in male prisons, and my impression is that female
researchers significantly outnumber male researchers in this
field. The emotional issues arising from being a male
researcher in a women’s prison may run parallel to the obser-
vations made here or may be interesting in entirely different
ways. However, the likelihood of them being disclosed seems
even more remote.
7. Sparks recounts how one small paragraph in the 70-page
document he wrote, which made reference to the private
nature of visits in the Special Unit, led to headlines in the
press such as “Sex Behind Bars in the Nutcracker Suite”
(Today) and “RAGE AS PRISON BARS ALLOW CONS
NOOKIE IN THE NICK” (The Sun). He reflects that in the
light of this disclosure he made it easier for the authorities to
accomplish what they had wanted to do for some time and
close down the prison unit (Sparks, 2002, p. 574).
8. The law students’ hostility might also reflect the fact that in the
legal realm emotions are confined to certain narrow roles in
order that they “do not intrude into the true preserve of law:
reason” (Bandes, 1999, p. 2, cited in Karstedt, 2002). As
Karsted (p. 300) notes, such a “juxtaposition of reason and
emotion, one deeply embedded in modern thought, seems
within the normative framework of jurisprudence to ignore
vital facets of the actual role of emotions in law and legal
procedures.”
9. Dividing opinion with autoethnography is not uncommon. For
example, Ellis describes how some colleagues responded to her
book Final Negotiations (1995) with warmth, gratitude, and
admiration, while others admitted feeling uneasy and embar-
rassed by her revealing of her self (Ellis, 2009, pp. 95-96).
10. A best-selling novel He Kills Coppers by Jake Arnott is
loosely based on his life, and football fans at many clubs still
taunt police with chants of “Harry Roberts is our friend, he
kills coppers . . . Let him out to kill some more. . . .”
11. To illustrate that emotion is not the “other” of reason, despite
criminology’s tendency to view it as such, Yar (2009) high-
lights fear as being one of the most easily understood exam-
ples of an emotional state that usually has an eminently
rational basis. While prison research typically underplays the
fact that prisons can be volatile and potentially dangerous
places, anecdotes shared in informal settings frequently bear
witness to the genuine, rational fear that some researchers in
some circumstances can experience.
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
73
12. On October 12, 2004, the Independent ran a story under the
headline “I have done my time” in which Roberts was inter-
viewed. The report states that “Roberts and his legal team
believe he is the victim of a campaign by the Police Federation
and the media, who have made the killer’s release from prison
a highly contentious—and politically damaging—decision for
any Home Secretary.”
References
Adams, C. (2000). Suspect data: Arresting research. In R. King
& E. Wincup (Eds.), Doing research on crime and justice (1st
ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, pp. 385-394.
Arnold, H. (2009). The experience of prison officer training. In
J. Bennett, B. Crewe, & A. Wahidin (Eds.), Understanding
prison staff. Cullompton, UK: Willan, pp. 399-418.
Beatty, A. (2005) Emotions in the field: What are we talking
about? Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, 11, 17-37.
Becker, H. (1967). Whose side are we on? Social Problems, 14(3),
234-247.
Bosworth, M. (1999). Engendering resistance: Agency and power
in women’s prisons. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Bosworth, M., Campbell, D., Demby, B., Ferranti, S. and Santos,
M. (2005). Doing prison research: Views from inside. Qualita-
tive Inquiry, 11, 249-264.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice, Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1999). The weight of the world—social suffering in
contemporary society. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Cohen, S. (1988). Against criminology. New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction Publishers.
Crawley, E. (2006). Doing prison work. Cullompton, UK: Willan.
Crewe, B. (2009). The prisoner society: Power, adaptation, and
social life in an English prison. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Denzin, N. (1989). Interpretive biography. Newbury Park, CA:
SAGE.
Drake, D., & Harvey, J. (2010, July 13). Criminological research as
emotional labour? Paper presented to British Society of Crimi-
nology conference, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK.
Ellis, C. (2009). ReVision: Autoethnographic reflections on life
and work. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.
Ferrell, J. (1998). Criminological verstehen: Inside the imme-
diacy of crime. In J. Ferrell & M. Hamm (Eds.), Ethnogra-
phy at the edge. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press,
pp. 20-42.
Ferrell, J. (1999). Cultural criminology. Annual Review of Sociol-
ogy, 25, 395-418.
Finch, J. (1984). “It’s great to have someone to talk to”: The ethics
and politics of interviewing women. In C. Bell (Ed.), Social
researching: Politics, problems, practice. London: Routledge,
pp. 71-87.
Garot, R. (2004) ‘‘’You’re Not a Stone’’: Emotional Sensitivity in
a Bureaucratic Setting,’ Journal of Contemporary Ethnogra-
phy 33(6): 735-766.
74 Qualitative Inquiry 18(1)
Genders, E., & Player, E. (1995). Grendon: A study of a therapeu-
tic prison. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life.
New York, NY: Anchor.
Goffman, E. (1961). On the characteristics of total institutions:
The inmate world. In D. Cressey (Ed.), The prison: Studies in
institutional organization and change. New York, NY: Holt,
Rinehart & Winston, pp. 22-47.
Hammersley, M. (2005, December 7). Ethnography: Problems and
prospects. Paper presented at CCIG conference, Open Univer-
sity, Milton Keynes, UK.
Hayano, D. M. (1979). Auto-ethnography: Paradigms, problems,
and prospects. Human Organization, 38(1), 99-104
Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization
of human feeling. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hollway, W., & Jefferson, T. (2000). Doing qualitative research dif-
ferently: Free association, narrative and the interview method.
London: SAGE.
Hubbard, G., Backett-Milburn, K., & Kemmer, D. (2001). Working
with emotion: Issues for the researcher in fieldwork and team-
work. International Journal of Social Research Methodology,
4(2), 119-137.
Hunt, J. C. (1989). Psychoanalytic aspects of fieldwork. London:
SAGE.
Jacobs, J. (1977). Stateville: The penitentiary in mass society. Chicago,
IL: Chicago University Press.
Jewkes, Y. (2002). Captive audience: Media, masculinity and
power in prisons. Cullompton, UK: Willan.
Jewkes, Y. (2005). Loss, liminality and the life sentence: Manag-
ing identity through a disrupted lifecourse. In A. Liebling & S.
Maruna (Eds.), The effects of imprisonment. Cullompton, UK:
Willan, pp. 366-388.
Jewkes, Y. (2010). Media and crime (2nd ed.). London: SAGE.
(Original work published 2004)
Jewkes, Y., & Johnston, H. (Eds.). (2006). Prison readings: A crit-
ical introduction to prisons and imprisonment. Cullompton,
UK: Willan.
Karstedt, S. (2002). Emotions and criminal justice. Theoretical
Criminology, 6(3), 299-317.
Katz, J. (1988). Seductions of crime. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Katz, J. (2002). Start here: Social ontology and research strategy.
Theoretical Criminology, 6(3), 255-278.
King, R. D. (2000). Doing research in prisons. In R. D. King &
E. Wincup (Eds.), Doing research on crime and justice (1st
ed.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press pp. 285-313.
Liebling, A. (1999). Doing research in prison: Breaking the
silence? Theoretical Criminology, 3(2), 147-173.
Liebling, A. (2001). Whose side are we on? Theory, practice and
allegiances in prisons research. British Journal of Criminol-
ogy, 41, 472-484.
Merton, R. K. (1972). Insiders and outsiders: A chapter in the soci-
ology of knowledge. American Journal of Sociology, 78(1),
9-47.
Mills, J. (2004). “There’s a lot in those keys isn’t there?” The
experience of a female researcher researching rape in a male
Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015
prison. In G. Mesko, M. Pagon, & B. Dobovsek (Eds.),
Policing in Central and Eastern Europe: Dilemmas of con-
temporary criminal justice. Maribor, Slovenia: University
of Maribor. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/Mesko/208040.
pdf. Accessed November 9, 2011.
Oakley, A. (1981). Interviewing women: A contradiction in terms.
In H. Roberts (Ed.), Doing feminist research. London: Rout-
ledge, pp. 30-61.
Okely, J., & Callaway, H. (Eds.). (1992). Anthropology and auto-
biography. London: Routledge.
Phillips, C., & Earle, R. (2010). Reading difference differently?
Identity, epistemology and prison ethnography. British Jour-
nal of Criminology, 50(2), 360-378.
Piacentini, L. (2004). Cultural talk and other intimate acquain-
tances with Russian prisons. Crime, Media, Culture: An Inter-
national Journal, 1(2), 189-208.
Piché, J., & Walby, K. (2010). Problematizing carceral tours. British
Journal of Criminology, 50(3), 570-581.
Reed-Danahay, D. E. (Ed.). (1997). Auto/ethnography: Rewriting
the self and the social. Oxford, UK: Berg.
Schlosser, J. A. (2008). Prison research issues in interviewing
inmates: Navigating the methodological landmines of prison
research. Qualitative Inquiry, 14(8), 1500-1525.
Shaffir, W. B., Stebbins, R. A., & Turowetz, A. (1980). Fieldwork
experience: Qualitative approaches to social research. New York,
NY: St. Martins.
Sim, J. (2004). The victimised state and the mystification of social
harm. In P. Hillyard, C. Pantazis, S. Tombs, & D. Gordon
(Eds.), Beyond criminology: Taking harm seriously. London:
Pluto, pp. 113-132.
Simon, J. (2000). The “society of captives” in the era of hyper-
incarceration. Theoretical Criminology, 4(3), 285-308.
Sparks, R. (2002). Out of the “digger”: The warrior’s honor and
the guilty observer. Ethnography, 3(4), 556-581.
Sparks, R., Bottoms, A. E., & Hay, W. (1996). Prisons and the
problem of order. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Spradley, J. P. (1979). The ethnographic interview. New York, NY:
Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Steier, F. (1991). Research and reflexivity. London: SAGE.
Turner, J. H. (2009) ‘The Sociology of Emotions: Basic Theoreti-
cal Arguments,’ Emotion Review 1(4): 340–354.
van Zyl Smit, D. (2007). Prisoners’ rights. In Y. Jewkes (Ed.),
Handbook on prisons. Cullompton, UK: Willan, pp. 566-584.
Wacquant, L. (2002). The curious eclipse of prison ethnography
in the age of mass incarceration. Ethnography, 3(4), 371-398.
Walker, S., & Worrall, A. (2000). Life as a woman: The gendered
pains of indeterminate imprisonment. Prison Service Journal,
132, 27-37.
Warren, C. (1988). Gender issues in field research. London:
SAGE.
Yar, M. (2009). Neither Scylla nor Charybdis: Transcending the
criminological dualism between rationality and the emo-
tions. Internet Journal of Criminology. Retrieved from http://
www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/Majid%20-%20
Neither%20Scylla%20nor%20Charybdis.pdf
Jewkes 75

Bio
Yvonne Jewkes is professor of criminology at the University of
Leicester. Her research focuses on prisons and the lived experi-
ence of imprisonment and on the relationship between media and
crime. She is the author of Captive Audience: Media, Masculinity
and Power in Prisons (Willan, 2002) and Media and Crime (Sage,
2010, 2nd ed.) and editor of the Handbook on Prisons (Willan,
2007). She is also one of the founding editors of Crime, Media,
Culture: An International Journal and is on the editorial board of
the British Journal of Criminology.

Downloaded from qix.sagepub.com at Uni of Southern Queensland on June 22, 2015