Telling the Truth Takes a Collective Effort*: Lessons in Excavating Missing Voices in Penal Reform

• In Event: New Directions In Critical Methodology

Abstract

The history of prisons is largely an administrative one that occludes from view experiences of those who lived and worked within the walls. As a result, the socio-historical understanding of policy decisions is incomplete and misleading, and actual outcomes poorly understood. To rectify these issues, this interdisciplinary and multi-faceted critical research project examines alternate narratives of prison reform, by juxtaposing official state discourses with the minutes of Warden’s conferences, administrative correspondence, prisoners’ writing in the penal press, (ex)prisoner autobiographies, mainstream press reports, and the first-hand account of a penal press editor of the era under consideration. The researchers contend that a multi-modal approach to methodology, utilizing the tools of social history, is needed in order to expose what Foucault referred to as “regimes of truth” regarding prison reform.

*Joyce Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), 309.

Authors

• Melissa Munn, Okanagan College

• Chris Clarkson, Okanagan College