Making Windows in Walls: Strategies for Prison Research

This article examines the relationships between prison structure, researcher access to prisons, and scholarship about prisons. Drawing on the author's own work over more than 10 years as a prison educator, legal advocate, and prison researcher, as well as on the scholarship of other prison researchers throughout the social sciences, the article argues that prisons resist scrutiny at two stages. First, prisons are structurally and bureaucratically closed off from research; second, prison researchers are emotionally disconnected from their work. These two layers of obfuscation maintain the prison as a social black site: physically located outside of our communities, invisible to the public and the researcher alike. In an effort to overcome these barriers, this article outlines a mixed method, collaborative approach to prison research and discusses the ethical and emotional challenges of this approach. By identifying the major obstacles to meaningful prison research, as well as some possible strategies to overcoming these obstacles, this article seeks to make such work more feasible for investigators in many disciplines.