"Get in, get out, go back?" : transitioning from prison ethnography to prison policy research in Russia

Piacentini, Laura; Drake, Deborah H. and Earle, Rod and Sloan, Jennifer, eds. (2015) "Get in, get out, go back?" : transitioning from prison ethnography to prison policy research in Russia. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography. Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology . Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.. ISBN 9781137403872

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Abstract

Prisons are unpredictable worlds that exist in time and in space. They are institutions people ‘go to’ acting as both a product and a generator of society’s lost trust in acts of malevolence, crime and re-offending (Wacquant, 2002). Prisons have endured for centuries and consequently, the arrangement of people, activities and buildings are deeply implicated in a power-knowledge couplet (see Foucault, 1980) where phenomena, events and structures of history are registered and dispersed. Indeed the prison is one of very few institutions where pain, suffering and power are depressed into the entire infrastructure and social fabric. In my ethnographic work a combination of sheer curiosity that Russia remains an uncharted penal territory for Western scholars, coupled with a long-standing personal interest in the region that extended to mastering the language, made the site one of rich and potent allure. What I have learned about all prisons - from doing prison research in Russia - is that ‘the place’ (jurisdiction) and the ‘the site’ (the prison) are the repositories of a unique cultural relationship: the relationship between the prison and the state is a clear mirror reflection of the relationship between the person and the state. Thus, the prison reveals the state, which is why prisons are such unique sites of sociological inquiry. In my chapter I will do two things. First, I will reflect on almost twenty years of doing ethnography in Russian prisons. What I hope to achieve is a better understanding of the totality of the physical, emotional and intellectual challenges of researching a hidden penal system such as Russia’s; one which looms large and vast across the European sphere and which weighs heavily in the histories of incarceration in high punishment societies. My own prison research journey is one in which the historical and cultural registers of incarceration can be understood as ruptured, contingent and in a state of cultural to-ing and fro-ing.

ORCID iDs

Piacentini, Laura ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3817-6012; Drake, Deborah H., Earle, Rod and Sloan, Jennifer
  • Item type:Book Section
    ID code:54476
    Dates:
    Date
    Event
    June 2015
    Published
    Notes:Piacentini, L. (2015). "Get in, get out, go back?": transitioning from prison ethnography to prison policy research in Russia. In D. H. Drake, R. Earle, & J. Sloan (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Prison Ethnography. (Palgrave Studies in Prisons and Penology). Palgrave Macmillian. reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan'. This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive, published, version of record is available here: http://www.palgrave.com/page/detail/the-palgrave-handbook-of-prison-ethnography-deborah-h--drake/?sf1=barcode&st1=9781137403872
    Subjects:Social Sciences > Social pathology. Social and public welfare > Penology. Prisons. Correction
    Department:Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HaSS) > Strathclyde Law School > Law
    Depositing user: Pure Administrator
    Date deposited:06 Oct 2015 09:07
    Last modified:11 Nov 2024 15:01
    Related URLs:
    URI:https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/id/eprint/54476
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