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“…even roses grow out of sh*t, don’t they?”
Reflections on an interview with ‘P’, who described what it was like to try and do good when you’re also labelled as bad.
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“I’ve been perfectly happy in prison”
A post reflecting on an interview with an elderly life-sentenced prisoner, who said he had enjoyed his prison sentence, and didn’t feel as though he had been punished at all.
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New publication: Only one way to swim?
I’ve got a new article in the British Journal of Criminology. The published version is behind a paywall, but those without access can download the accepted manuscript here, or a pre-print (i.e. the version I originally submitted to the journal, before peer review) here or here. It is pitched at an academic readership, and it’s…
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Three stories
Three stories, told by one interviewee, about brief experiences outside prison during a very long sentence.
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Interviews as power games
How an interview left me feeling deeply uncomfortable – and what this told me that the interviewee might not have.
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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.
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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.
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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,…
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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…
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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,…