How an interview left me feeling deeply uncomfortable – and what this told me that the interviewee might not have.
Interviews as transactions
How agreeing to do an interview became a negotiation, and what this says about the ‘rules of the game’ for prison research.
The ‘rules of the game’ in prison research
The first of a series of posts reflecting on ethical and other dilemmas that have come up while I’ve been doing prison fieldwork.
Forthcoming event
Just a very brief plug for a public event that I’m speaking at with a colleague, Caroline Lanskey, on Thursday 31st. We’ll be talking about historical research we did last year on historic abuses in youth prisons, which took place during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s but went unrecognised by those responsible for preventing them, […]
Comparing sentences, comparing offences (part 2)
This is the second of two posts thinking about how lifers (and others) might compare what it means to have different lengths of sentence. In the last post I published, a lifer I called Richard mused about what it meant to him to have the same tariff as other men in his prison workplace, whose […]
Comparing sentences, comparing offences (part 1)
This is the first of two posts thinking about how lifers (and others) might compare what it means to have different lengths of sentence. Selecting participants on tariff length One thing that has been on my mind lately is how to select a sample of people to interview. I’ll be working in two different prisons, […]
Not just a piece of cake
On why hospitality in prison can mean rather more than it does elsewhere, and why a piece of cake isn’t just a piece of cake.