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The paper aims to discuss liminal ethnography as a new approach for conducting research in segregated organisations.

The paper proposes liminality as a conceptual key to understanding both the condition of the organisational ethnographer and that of her interlocutors. Conversatio is the novel hermeneutical method that is discussed in conjunction with liminal ethnography.

Liminal ethnography as outlined in the paper emerged as an approach from preliminary contact with the organisational reality of the monastery as a type of total institution. Similarly, conversatio suggested itself as a method that maximises limited face to face contact with interlocutors whose access to the external world is restricted by a behavioural code enshrined in a Rule.

Paradoxically, the restrictions imposed on the researcher provided inspiration for the analytical approach proposed by the paper therefore initial limitations such as restricted access eventually spurred conceptual development.

The original approach should be of interest to organisational researchers operating in total institutions or in organisations where severely restricted access renders extant methodologies only partly applicable, if at all. The paper also discusses ethical issues arising from collaboration with rule‐governed communities.

This paper aims to report findings about how prisoners experience and cope with COVID-19 restrictions, which can contribute to an understanding of how pandemic responses, and specifically the COVID-19 response, affect prisoners.

Data was collected through ethnographic fieldwork involving days of observations (N = 24) and the conduction of semi-structured interviews with prisoners (N = 30) in closed prisons and detentions in Denmark between May and December 2021. The transcribed interviews and field notes were processed and coded by using the software programme NVivo.

The data analysis reveals that the pains of imprisonment have been exacerbated to people incarcerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. To relieve pains of imprisonment, prisoners turn to censoriousness as an informal coping strategy, where they complain about inconsistency and injustice in the prison’s COVID-19 prevention strategy to reveal the prison system itself as a rule-breaking institution. The prisoners criticise the prison management for using COVID-19 as an excuse, treating prisoners unjustly or not upholding the COVID-19 rules and human rights. Furthermore, principles of justice and equality are also alleged by some prisoners who contemplate the difficulty in treating all prisoners the same.

More research will be needed to create a full picture of how prisoners cope with pandemic responses. Further research could include interviews with people working inside prisons.

In a Scandinavian context, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to apply an ethnographic approach in exploring prison life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The purpose of this paper is to explore Bryan Stevenson’s (2014, 2015) call to action from within two emergent schools of thought in criminology, “cultural criminology,” and “convict criminology”, which share a special concern with the contributions that criminological research makes to a climate of social control and punishment. The author’s central aim is to explore the capacity of what the author argues is a potentially under-leveraged tool of social change – the philosophies underlying and implemented in cultural and convict criminology.

To demonstrate the potential impact of this research, the author draws upon a purposive sample of qualitative studies that exemplify the particular emotive, moral, and aesthetic goals central to Stevenson’s call to action. The impact of the production of images of crime, crime control, and criminals that emerge in the development of the paradigms central to cultural and convict criminology is finally discussed in terms of Stevenson’s four prescriptions for social and criminal justice reform.

The underlying philosophies, theoretical assumptions, and methodological approaches dictated by convict and cultural criminology are uniquely equipped to make visible the forces linked to resistance to penal and social reform.

In synthesizing cultural criminology and the emergent convict criminology as guides to doing empirical research, and identifying each as embodying Stevenson’s call to action, the author hopes – maybe not to extract those easily ignitable, invisible forces away from reform efforts entirely, but at least – to provide those who are interested with a more nuanced map of where they are not likely to live and breathe them. Stimulating and widening the criminological imagination might not satisfy our need to quickly and concretely apply a solution to injustice, but it might be what the problem demands.

Stevenson (2014) argues that the extent of injustice in the US criminal justice system is so pervasive, extraordinary, and long standing, that everyone has a role to play in the course of our everyday lives in turning the tide of indifference and cruelty that feed mass injustice and incarceration. Applying his proposals to the on-the-ground working lives of empirical criminologists holds potential for effecting change from the top-down.

Research has shown that a key issue for prisoners using healthcare services during their sentence is that of patient confidentiality. Maintaining prisoners’ medical confidentiality has been shown to be difficult in the prison setting as many treatments, especially those considered to be out of the ordinary, are more likely to result in a breach of medical confidence. This can include treating infectious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis or tuberculosis, which can often include long term and regular contact with healthcare staff, and which, in some cases, may require referrals to specialists outside the prison setting. In addition, institutional factors unique to prisons may impact on healthcare staffs’ ability to maintain prisoners’ confidentiality, such as security or health and safety concerns. Drawing on research carried out by the author on healthcare and people with problematic drug use in prisons in a range of European countries, this paper considers the factors that impact on maintaining prisoners’ medical confidentiality and some of the attempts to address this issue.

The authors thought of the idea for this exploratory paper for Drugs and Alcohol Today after visiting a local prison on the outskirts of Madrid from which these field notes are taken. The authors have also had informal conversations with the contacts working in the Spanish Prison service. When the authors looked at some of the literature around the relationships between drugs and prisons in Spain, the authors found lots of statistics, and material which either said there were lots of drugs in prison or literature which presented over-medicalised processes of drug treatment. In short, the authors found few studies which could bring to life the kind of problems drugs bring to the prison and how the dynamics of the prison are not only directly impacted by drug use but also as drug dealing/trafficking. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

What the authors offer is only really to draw your attention to the issue. The authors have no real methodology to reflect on other than one of us is an experienced participant observer and the other is a lawyer and criminologist who has worked with numerous clients processed for drug offences in and around prisons in Madrid. Between us, we have undertaken six visits to Madrileñas prisons.

In this explorative paper the authors want to do three things. First, draw attention to the extent of problem of drugs in prison in Spain. Second, the authors want to suggest that the role drugs needs reconsideration as it plays a pivotal role in the functioning of the prison. Lastly, the authors push for more research into this issue which goes beyond conventional surveys and unnecessary complex regression analyses and instead takes a qualitative approach using observational data and informal conversations to explore these dynamics in more detail.

First, that there is an urgent need to go beyond these official statistics and explore in some nuanced detail about the prison experience in Spain. The existing research is limiting in that it talks tiresomely about the numbers incarcerated and fails to admit the significance of drugs not only as a motivating factor for incarceration but also the role drugs play in the prison environment. The authors need to consider as much the changing demography of Spanish prisons – for example more immigrants, different drugs, etc. – as the everyday experience of drugs, debt, disagreements and violence and how they intersect as a lived experience rather than consider them as separate issues of analysis, dormant from the interconnectedness of the micro-interactions of the prison environment and the respective institutional power structures. The key to this debate, and the general messages of this paper, is to realize a study which can explore the nuances of the role and function of drugs play in Spanish prisons.

About one in five men living with HIV in the USA passes through a correctional center annually. Jails and prisons are seen therefore as key intervention sites to promote HIV treatment as prevention. Almost no research, however, has examined inmates’ perspectives on HIV treatment or their strategies for retaining access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) during incarceration. The purpose of this paper is to describe the results of an exploratory study examining men's perceptions of and experiences with HIV care and ART during incarceration.

Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with 42 HIV positive male and male-to-female transgendered persons recently released from male correctional centers in Illinois, USA.

Interpersonal violence, a lack of safety, and perceived threats to privacy were frequently cited barriers to one's willingness and ability to access and adhere to treatment. Over 60 percent of study participants reported missed doses or sustained treatment interruption (greater than two weeks) because of failure to disclose their HIV status, delayed prescribing, intermittent dosing and out-of-stock medications, confiscation of medications, and medication strikes.

Substantial improvements in ART access and adherence are likely to follow organizational changes that make incarcerated men feel safer, facilitate HIV status disclosure, and better protect the confidentiality of inmates receiving ART.

This study identified novel causes of ART non-adherence among prisoners and provides first-hand information about how violence, stigma, and the pursuit of social support influence prisoner's decisions to disclose their HIV status or accept ART during incarceration.

Understanding and preventing prison-based violence remains a challenge for both prison professionals and academic researchers. Alongside the rising tide of prison violence, the contemporary researcher views prison violence as a social problem and something that needs to be understood from an ecological viewpoint before violence prevention strategies can be implemented. The purpose of this study was to present an exploratory investigation into the causes of violence within a Category B UK prison, its impact and the factors that contribute to violence prevention.

Adopting an ethnographic, qualitative methodology, semi-structured interviews were conducted with six prisoners to gather their individual perspectives on prison violence. Interview transcripts were analysed by the researcher using grounded theory analysis.

Results revealed that participants perceived debt as a catalyst for violence and associated a sense of “loss” with emotional violent outbursts. Furthermore, participants placed responsibility on other prisoners and staff to facilitate violence prevention outcomes by making positive changes (prisoners) and being honest, and moral within the workplace (staff). Emphasis was placed on cultural maintenance factors that appeared to promote, reinforce and maintain a violent cultural environment.

Including the prisoner voice in prison violence research is fundamental to understanding the complexity of the problem. Understanding the cultural environment within which violence occurs strengthens the ecological perspective. Violence prevention strategies identified in this research requires change from prisoners, staff and ultimately the wider prison system if it is to succeed in preventing violence.

Results are discussed considering their implications for future policy and practice in the context of violence prevention.

This paper explores two museums in Taiwan, both former sites of incarceration, and asks how they reflect Taiwan’s evolving relationship with the past. Taiwan has successfully emerged from its authoritarian past into a democratic present; yet, it still bears the scars of its traumatic and violent history in the places where trauma and pain was exacted over Taiwanese people by different regimes. Two of these places are former prisons, now museums with common histories of incarceration, but very different approaches to presentation of traumatic pasts. This paper aims to understand the selective presentation of narratives of punishment in prison museums in Taiwan and what they reflect about Taiwan’s national identity.

This research used a qualitative ethnographic methodology, approaching prison museums as research sites with multidimensional textual, spatial and visual data. This study used a narrative ethnology approach to analyse the content, structure and social context surrounding the stories told about punishment at the sites.

While the Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park documents past abuses under the authoritarian Kuomindang Government (1945–1987), the narratives presented at the Chiayi Prison Museum, constructed under Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945), ignore past colonial violence. This study argues that the invisibility of past colonial violence in Chiayi prison museum acts to strengthen Taiwan’s multicultural national identity, while Jingmei WTMP acts to valorise political prisoners as heroic fighters for Taiwan’s democracy and human rights.

This research makes a contribution to the museum studies literature through extending understanding of the relationship between former carceral spaces and national identity projects.

A reflexive ethnographic account of the practical and emotional challenges encountered by the researcher during fieldwork is too often separated from the analytical research results, which, as argued by this paper, downplays or even ignores the analytical value of the encountered challenges. Drawing on personal examples from ethnographic research in immigration detention, the purpose of this paper is to show that these challenges have an intrinsic analytical value.

Ethnographic research was carried out in two immigration detention centres in Belgium and one in the Netherlands. Observations, informal conversations with detainees and staff, and semi-structured interviews with detainees were triangulated. Extracts from fieldnotes are presented and discussed to demonstrate the analytical value of the challenges experienced during fieldwork.

Three important challenges are presented: distrust from organisational gatekeepers and research participants, disruptions of the organisational routines, and witnessing and experiencing feelings of powerlessness. The analytical value of these challenges is strongly connected to theoretical and analytical themes that emerged during the research.

Ethnographic researchers are encouraged to explicitly treat the reflexive accounts of practical and emotional challenges as “data in itself” and as such nested within their analytical results.

There is interest in promoting health in prison from governmental levels, but, to date, understanding how best to do this is unclear. This paper argues that nuanced understanding of context is required to understand health promotion in prison. The purpose of the paper is to examine the potential for empowerment, a cornerstone of health promotion practice, in high-security prison establishments.

Independent prison inspections, conducted by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons for England and Wales, form a critical element in how prisons are assessed. Documentary analysis was undertaken on all eight high-security prison reports using framework analysis.

Analysis revealed elements of prison life which were disempowering and antithetical to health promotion. While security imperatives were paramount, there were examples where this was disproportionate and disempowered individuals. The data show examples where, even in these high-security contexts, empowerment can be fostered. These were exemplified in relation to peer approaches designed to improve health and where prisoners felt part of democratic processes where they could influence change.

Both in the UK and internationally, there is a growing rhetoric for delivering effective health promotion interventions in prison, but limited understanding about how to operationalise this. This paper gives insight into how this could be done in a high-security prison environment.

This is the first paper which looks at the potential for health promotion to be embedded in high-security prisons. It demonstrates features of prison life which act to disempower and also support individuals to take greater control over their health.