Metabolizing Risk as Prison Researchers: Navigating the Ethics of Engaging Criminalized Voices

• In Event: PrisonPandemic: A Unique and Sizable Collection of Stories by Incarcerated People on Pandemic Conditions

Abstract

Prisoners are classified as additionally protected subjects in behavioral research with heightened protocols in an effort to eliminate risk for incarcerated participants. The consent and oversight of the carceral system is required to conduct research, which can have the effect of drastically limiting the types of research conducted in carceral institutions. The PrisonPandemic project, an archival project not governed by the Institutional Review Board, borrowed from and created our own ethical framework for collecting data from archival contributors. In this paper, we ask what ethical regulations govern work that is not “biomedical and behavioral research”—including oral history and archival projects, legal work and research, journalistic projects, big data, and multi-disciplinary projects—but nonetheless takes place inside the academy? We examine ethical frameworks for research in the social sciences, as well as participatory action, oral history, archival, and data use ethical frameworks, attending to how these academic ethical frameworks define risk and how these definitions shape resulting research, in intentional and unintentional ways. Through analysis of examples from each of these frameworks, we argue that efforts to eliminate risk often create other harms, while distracting from more fundamental ethical questions about the well-being of incarcerated research subjects and data contributors.

Authors

• Joanne DeCaro, University of California, Irvine

• Alexis Rowland, University of California, Irvine

• Keramet Reiter, University of California, Irvine