“Real Research”: Methods from an inside-out Jail Archive

Background: Formal research with currently incarcerated populations requires approval from both researcher university and state correctional Institutional Review Boards, which can be ambivalently protective and troubling, as correctional facilities maintain the power to disallow research invested in decarceration. Studies with currently incarcerated populations often favor survey methods, limited or no questions related to violence or trauma experienced by correctional staff, and prisons over jails. These constraints generate the possibility for researchers to imagine both alternative ways of conceptualizing access in and knowledge dissemination out. The Jail Solidarity Network archive serves as one example of non-institutional, inside-out research into one of the country’s largest jails. Currently, the archive holds 117 recorded conversations, hundreds of handwritten grievances, and hundreds of pages of internal jail documents from Freedom of Information Act requests. We argue that the process of counter-surveillance and the outcome of a public archive subverts the power of Cook County Department of Correction’s internal “data collection” by creating an opportunity for insiders' voices to have truth value. This presentation seeks to explore the process of developing ethical guidelines for collecting stories of incarceration with incarcerated people themselves.

Methods: Using a case-study methodology, findings were drawn from unstructured interviews conducted over the phone with currently incarcerated people and the two-year process of developing the public archive. Memos collected during the development process, conversations with lawyers, journalists, and organizers, and interviews with members of a weekly workspace dedicated to project development, all contributed to thematic tensions around the potential consequences and opportunities of non-institutional research.

Findings: Several consistent tensions emerged over the course of the project: inside-out decision making processes, relational and communication norms, and conceptualizations of risk. Forming political demands for jail administrators and strategizing about the use of the archive required a decentralized decision-making process interrupted by transfers and interrupted communication. Differences in how insiders and outsiders conceptualized the oral history relationship textured the nature of stories told. The risks insiders were willing to take were at odds with outsiders’ desire to protect insiders from retaliation. Despite these tensions, non-institutional methods created the space for public access to the stories of incarcerated people, including collaborations with organizers, journalists, and lawyers.

Conclusion: Alternative forms of research present both challenges and possibilities. Looking to axiology, a case-study of these methods provides insight into how researchers can bring their skillset to more direct political interventions beyond the limits of institutional collaboration with carceral facilities.