The Curious Eclipse of Prison Ethnography in the Age of Mass Incarceration

TLDR

The article situates itself in the Los Angeles County Jail, illustrating how the US detention system’s entry point operates, and notes that recent sociological and anthropological studies of inmates have faded at a time when such work is most needed. The issue aims to revitalize and internationalize prison ethnography, urging researchers to prioritize immersive observation within penal facilities over debating the prison’s theoretical framing. The article outlines obstacles to such research, including limited access and funding, institutional academic barriers, the low scientific status of the prison as a subject, and the inappropriate use of a military metaphor of “collateral damage.” It concludes that penetrating the prison’s interior provides a unique perspective for contributing to comparative state ethnography in the era of neoliberal dominance.

Abstract

This article first takes the reader inside the Los Angeles County Jail, the largest detention facility in the `Free World', to give a ground-level sense of how the entry portal of the US detention system operates by way of prelude to this special issue on the ethnography of the prison. A survey of the recent sociology and anthropology of carceral institutions shows that field studies depicting the everyday world of inmates in America have gone into eclipse just when they were most needed on both scientific and political grounds following the turn toward the penal management of poverty and the correlative return of the prison to the forefront of the societal scene. Accordingly, this issue seeks to reinvigorate and to internationalize the ethnography of the carceral universe understood both as a microcosm endowed with its own material and symbolic tropism and as vector of social forces, political nexi, and cultural processes that traverse its walls. Field researchers need to worry less about `interrupting the terms of the debate' about the prison and more about getting inside and around penal facilities to carry out intensive, close-up observation of the myriad relations they contain and support. This article discusses the obstacles to such research, including questions of access and funding, the professional organization of academe, the lowly social and therefore scientific status of the object of investigation, and the (mis)use of the military metaphor of `collateral damage'. It concludes by suggesting that getting `in and out of the belly of the beast' offers a unique vanish point from which to contribute to the comparative ethnography of the state in the age of triumphant neoliberalism.