Prison Writings as a Source of Qualitative Prison Research

The main argument of this paper is that the results of qualitative prison research based on prison writings might be a valuable source for better understanding the effects imprisonment has on convicts and of the characteristics of the experience of imprisonment. Furthermore, these insights describing the qualitative effects could be particularly important in all sorts of reform of the system of punishment and resocialisation, and therefore should be much more present in penology and other relevant disciplines in the region. The objective of the paper is to introduce the basic principles of grounded qualitative prison research on prison writings to researchers in Serbian penology and criminology and provide an example of it. Starting with the epistemological and theoretical foundations of qualitative research in the postpositivist philosophy of science and listing the main characteristics of qualitative prison research, I continue with overviewing the main procedures of qualitative prison research based on writings such as sampling, data collection, coding and data interpretation, followed by drawing scientifically and policy-relevant conclusions. Subsequently, I provide the typology of the main forms of prison writings, potentially helpful for understanding the variety and richness of literate production coming from prisons that could bring valuable insights for penological and criminological studies. In the next sections, I examine the methodological procedures usually employed in prison writing-based qualitative research such as textual analysis, discourse analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA). These most common procedures are briefly overviewed to summarise the basics of the qualitative analysis derived from prison notes and open the way for the conclusions. In the conclusion, I summarise the main advantages and disadvantages of the much wider use of qualitative research based on prison notes in penology, criminology and related disciplines, both in Serbia and in the region.