Building Bridges and Opening Doors: An Activist Scholar’s Path to Conducting Cooperative Research with State-level Prison Administrators in the Era of Mass Incarceration

• In Event: Corrections Administration and Penal Change

Abstract

The durability of mass incarceration and the significant variance in its characteristics across states and facilities beg prison scholars to get inside prisons to conduct research that builds knowledge, expands theory, and most importantly works to reduce the vast damages of mass incarceration. This is easier said than done. Jonathan Simon has written that “prison administrators during the era of mass incarceration have become insular and resistant to documentation by journalists, social scientists, [and] human rights experts, making it far more difficult to know beyond anecdote and urban legend how bad things have become inside” (Simon 2014: 5). This presentation will discuss the critical, humanistic imperative for punishment scholars to build cooperative bridges to prison administrators in order to challenge mass incarceration through rigorous, social justice driven research. Guided by Liebling’s admonition to engage in appreciative inquiry, and a personal commitment to making the collective project that is the prison transparent, the presentation will marshal my experience conducting research with state-level prison administrators nationwide in order to provide practical and methodological guidance for those who are interested in bearing witness to mass incarceration through cooperative research with administrators and others directly involved in the daily operation of our punishment state.

Author

• Jay Borchert, Manhattan College